Kanary 2025 Recap & 2026 Updates

Jan 16, 2026

What’s covered:

The experiences that shaped our product thinking in 2025
Why we launched a new Professional tier on web, in early stages
How that impacts new and longtime members

Our product thinking: Everyone is become a public figure

Amidst AI-driven layoffs, advice from recruiters is everywhere. Grapevine, a boutique recruiting agency, gave their top recommendation on CNBC this week: build your online presence.

This isn’t a new idea. When Kanary launched in 2020, the idea of personal branding was well known. The world of millionaire influencers and Twitter-famous solopreneurs seemed like a bright future. Five years later, we’re seeing a much darker side. Those who succeeded in building a personal brand online, face backlash from trolls, stalkers, politicians, and scammers. The threats quickly outpace the budgets & skills of police, security guards, and trust & safety teams. Unrecognizable deepfakes harness the power of your personal brand and use it for evil: financial fraud, defamation campaigns, violent threats. In 2026, building your online presence will help you find your next job, but it also creates risk.

These are big problems, and we’re a small team of engineers, data scientists, and analysts. Like every year since launching, in 2025, we wrote a lot of code, but the best insights came from meeting with leaders in security, safety, technology, and journalism. At Trust Con in San Diego, we spoke to platform teams at Meta about shrinking budgets to moderate terrorist activity. At DEFCON we tinkered with masked hackers on vishing and voice cloning projects. At TwitchCon we amplified the unhinged stories of creators dealing with account take overs, swatting, and doxxing. The people we met weren't afraid, they were tired. They were looking for ways to control what information is out there before someone weaponizes it.

More than ever our team at Kanary is dedicated to the wholistic problem of safeguarding people as they grow their online presence. And cut through the cacophony of apps, emails, and alerts, to give you one or two high impact things to think about, while taking tedious work off your plate.

A New Tier: Changes to Kanary heading into 2026

We’re thrilled to release a new way for individuals to sign up for Kanary on web. If you’ve read past updates, you’ll know we had limited individual sign ups to the mobile app in 2024. We did this because running Kanary on your device unblocks 90% of identity verification checks critical to successfully removing your information from websites. These checks make removals slow, frustrating, and expensive. With the mobile identification flows, those barriers go away because you’re more in the loop to prove the requests are legitimate. Over the course of 2025, we launched this new technology and evaluated feedback from our loyal members who downloaded the apps, beta tested new releases, and helped us improve the quality, functionality, and design. We’re proud to have launched the first and only free automated removal tool for iOS and Android.

But downloading a mobile app and running Kanary on your phone introduced new barriers we didn’t anticipate. Members told us that it was overwhelming to look at a list of exposures in the app. It was hard to remember to go back into the app and kick off a scan as frequently as they wanted. While the first time scan was thrilling to watch for most people, it wasn’t something people wanted locking up their device.

So with this feedback in mind, we’ve launched a new Professional tier. It removes some of the barriers without breaking the bank. The main improvement is Kanary manages scans for top sites like Google, notifying you about results. Scans happen automatically so you don’t have to remember or respond to a push notification. Some removal requests are now available on web, though most of the removal automations still run through the app to unblock verification issues.

We’re excited to continue making the Professional experience more and more powerful for our members heading into 2026. It’s still early, so we’ll be sharing more deep dives, data, and updates in the coming weeks. To sign up on the web or learn more about the feature set, pricing, and how it works, check out our website.

Our mobile app is still available for anyone in our community for free on iOS and Android. It’s also a nice add on to any of our Professional, Executive, or Enterprise services. And, we’re biased, but it’s kinda fun to watch Kanary run a live scan of Google about you. You might be surprised by what pops up.

How this impacts existing members

For members who joined the free mobile app, previously called ‘Kanary Copilot’, there aren’t any changes to the app, price, or functionality. The app is now called Kanary Community on our site.
For members who joined the premium mobile app at $9.99/mo, we’ve upgraded you to Kanary Professional which includes managed scans, more support, and is still $9.99/mo.
Members who joined Kanary before 2024 are still grandfathered into a hosted plan similar to our Enterprise tier.
Existing Kanary for Teams or Enterprise accounts don’t have any changes beyond the regular site coverage updates and admin support improvements.