Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection review
Our Verdict
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection scans the dark web for your information, monitors your online footprint and reports information breaches. It can keep you from becoming an identity-theft statistic, only it tin can't help you lot with credit monitoring.
For
- Open up and dark-web scans of your identity
- Supports up to v email addresses
- Reports new data breaches
- Reasonably priced
- Doesn't need your Social Security or credit-card info
Against
- No credit monitoring, identity-theft insurance or post-theft aid
- Failed to notify of a significant data alienation
Tom's Guide Verdict
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection scans the dark spider web for your information, monitors your online footprint and reports data breaches. Information technology can go along you from becoming an identity-theft statistic, but it can't assistance you with credit monitoring.
Pros
- +
Open and nighttime-spider web scans of your identity
- +
Supports up to five email addresses
- +
Reports new data breaches
- +
Reasonably priced
- +
Doesn't need your Social Security or credit-card info
Cons
- -
No credit monitoring, identity-theft insurance or post-theft assistance
- -
Failed to notify of a significant information breach
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection: Specs
Frequency of credit reports: None
Frequency of credit scores: None
Credit-improvement simulator: No
Address-change monitoring: No
Data alienation alerts: Yep
Investment account monitoring: No
Medical records monitoring: No
Payday loan monitoring: No
Sex offender alert: No
Security software: No
Title-modify alerts: No
Two-factor authentication: Aye
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection adds a layer of security and privacy by focusing on monitoring your online identity and augmenting any traditional antivirus programme. However, because it provides no credit monitoring or identity-theft insurance, information technology's non quite on the aforementioned playing field as LifeLock, IdentityForce and other full-featured identity theft protection services.
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection scans the open and dark web to see how far your online identity extends, alerts you to new data breaches and checks for impostors posing as you on social media.
Dissimilar some other identity-monitoring services, it doesn't demand your Social Security or credit-card numbers. Instead, it bases its evaluations on up to five email addresses that you lot provide. This makes Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection a reasonably priced and unintrusive option toward keeping your identity your own.
Read on for the residue of our Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection review.
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection: Costs and what's covered
Bitdefender'southward Digital Identity Protection can't compare with the best identity-theft protection services, such as LifeLock Ultimate Plus, Identity IQ Secure Max or IdentityForce UltraSecure + Credit. Those all include features such every bit credit monitoring, credit reports and scores, identity-theft insurance and legal advice should your identity exist stolen. Some also monitor financial accounts, court records and fifty-fifty property-championship changes.
Those total-fledged identity-theft-protection services can toll a few hundred dollars per twelvemonth. Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection is a budget-friendly alternative that focuses on misuse of your personal information online. It costs $79.99 per year — half off for the first year — or $7.99 a calendar month, and it tin monitor upwards to five digital personas. That'due south for a single individual, as there is no family plan.
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection: How we tested
During the late summer of 2021, I signed up to monitor my online persona with Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection. Over a month of daily use, I regularly tapped into the service to keep an eye on my online identity using a Lenovo ThinkPad T470 Windows laptop, a Samsung Galaxy Notation 20 Android telephone and an Apple tree iPad Pro.
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection: Monitoring
Bitdefender's Digital Identity Protection works below the surface. Information technology keeps an eye on your online persona using data from PIPL, a leading "people finder" service that mines the internet for openly available information on individuals. Digital Identity Protection can track your online identity based on up to five email accounts and three phone numbers that you provide.
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection's most innovative service mapped my online footprint, showing me the online services I had signed up for. This can help find someone abrogation with my online identity just is also a handy way to find services I no longer use. On the downside, information technology missed several online accounts I currently have, institute others I was unfamiliar with and didn't notify me when I deliberately inverse a password.
The service scans the open as well equally the dark web. Both scans might plough up artifacts of your identity, like birthdays, addresses and phone numbers, in an illegal data broker's files or in a nefarious database of personal data.
If you employ antivirus software like Norton 360 Deluxe or Tendency Micro Maximum Security, a major identity-theft-protection service similar Identity IQ, LifeLock or IdentityForce, or even some password managers such as Dashlane or Keeper, you lot already become this type of dark-spider web monitoring. Notwithstanding, Bitdefender says Digital Identity Protection uses auto learning techniques to detect patterns other services might miss.
What Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection doesn't practise is just as of import. Dissimilar LifeLock, IdentityForce or other full-fledged identity-theft-protection services, Digital Identity Protection doesn't insure you against losses from identity theft or help you with legal advice. Digital Identity Protection too lacks credit-agency monitoring that tin be the first sign something is amiss with your identity. All these are features that U.S. consumers are eager for.
Over the form of a month of daily use, I used Bitdefender Digital Identity Protect to check my online footprint, look for data breaches and monitor my social-media presence for imposters. I received 2 notifications via email about breaches and insecurities, but nothing turned out to be dangerous.
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection: Services and notifications
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection lets you lot know when 1 of your service providers has had a data breach. Knowing this might prompt y'all to alter your password or cancel the service.
However, Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection failed to notify me of the massive T-Mobile information alienation, which was all over the news during my testing catamenia. Considering I have used T-Mobile for a decade, my association with the wireless carrier did show upwards on my Digital Footprint, only there was nothing about the breach. (I had already changed my T-Mobile login information.)
The service likewise keeps an eye out for social-media impersonators on xxx popular sites ranging from Facebook to Twitter. It found nobody trying to exist me, but it's good that Digital Identity Protection is on the scout for this.
In one case a week, Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection puts all this data together and emails you a report. My most recent report showed that the service had performed 12 checks over the week and had identified iv possible impersonations and 33 possible information breaches. It also linked to an article near business relationship takeovers — light but useful reading.
Different traditional identity-theft-protection services that tin aid you lot update or erase incorrect information on credit reports, it's upward to you to remediate a threat or sign of identity theft if Digital Identity Protection finds one. If Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection extended its service to help fix such issues, that would raise its touch and information technology would make more sense to position information technology as a premium service.
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection: Setup
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection is one of the quickest identity-theft-protection services to fix because at that place's naught to download or install. It's all washed online through the Bitdefender Central web portal.
I began by signing up for the service, subsequently which I was emailed an activation lawmaking.
Clicking the link embedded in the activation code took me to my Bitdefender Central account, which showed a description of the service and the personal data I needed to provide to sign up.
I and so entered my name, e-mail address and phone number. You tin can provide upwards to three phone numbers, and the organisation can deal with both mobile and landline connections.
To verify that I was authorized to provide my own data, each registration of an email address or phone number required me to enter temporary codes that were sent to me via email, text message or automated phone call.
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection then got to work, searching for my data online. The program presented me with a rapid-fire sequence of bits personal data it constitute: addresses, alternate email accounts and phone numbers, erstwhile jobs, schools and my age. It likewise found two phone numbers and a website that I didn't recognize, but the service by and large was on target. From first to finish, the setup procedure took near ten minutes.
If I ever need to add new email accounts or phone numbers, it's quick and easy. The "+" symbol in the upper right of the interface leads to a information-entry screen.
Bitdefender said all the personal data I provided was encrypted on Bitdefender's servers. If you make up one's mind to cancel Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection, the company promises to concord the data for up to six months, then wipe it. Bitdefender support technicians tin can also erase any of or all your personal data from the company servers.
The service offers two-factor authentication (2FA) to protect your account from attackers who might know your countersign, though it's hard to effigy out where in the Bitdefender Central interface to gear up up the 2FA selection. Click your email address in the upper right corner, so select "Bitdefender Account." You'll exist taken to a unlike page and may have to log in again. Select "Password and Security" to turn on 2FA.
Meanwhile, Bitdefender provides 24/7 tech support besides as an extensive online expanse with FAQs and suggestions for beingness proactive about online protection. Its Educational activity department has recent articles on identity theft and digital security.
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection: Interface
Digital Identity Protection has no software and lives inside your Bitdefender Central online account. It fits correct into the Bitdefender Central main folio below the Dashboard and My Devices, simply above the Parental Control, Premium Services and My Subscriptions sections. However, there isn't a direct link to Digital Identity Protection from the well-known Bitdefender antivirus programs.
The Dashboard is flood with information. In that location are areas with the basics (name, accost and a summary of the data breaches), detailed data (social media identities) and oddities (how big my online community is compared to the boilerplate). In fact, in that location's then much information, you lot'd have to zoom out the browser to about 33% to see it all at one time.
Using the Bitdefender Central web interface on my Samsung Galaxy Notation 20 phone felt cramped, and items similar the Impersonation Check tab were truncated. I didn't have any other choice, however, because the Bitdefender Central mobile app didn't include the Digital Identity Protection details.
Regardless of whether you're using a telephone, tablet or notebook, the Digital Footprint tab showed me the online services and websites that I was signed upwardly with. There'due south a blank section for images that fabricated me cringe with anticipation.
Meanwhile, the Data Breaches department shows suspension-ins at online services I've used, forth with suggestions on how to mitigate the run a risk of futurity data breaches. The Impersonation Cheque promises to notify me if someone tries to abscond with my identity. Make sure the switch at the top of the page for electronic mail alerts is turned on, or you might never find out if someone does. The service found a Flickr account that belonged not to me, but to someone who shares my proper noun.
The Instruction section has useful articles on digital hygiene and breaches. Finally, Digital Identity Protection has a chronological Event History of what the service has done and constitute on your behalf.
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection review: Bottom line
A unique security product that augments traditional antivirus apps past alerting y'all about potential identity theft and online impersonators, Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection can take your online privacy to a college level.
While it tin can aid with identity monitoring, the service ignores credit monitoring and offers no insurance protection or help if your identity is stolen, features that U.S.-based identity-theft-protection services charge a lot for.
The best role is that the service doesn't require you lot to divulge your Social Security number or credit card numbers, as traditional identity-theft-protection services would.
But while information technology does a skillful job of identity monitoring, the service ignores credit monitoring and offers no insurance protection or assistance if your identity is stolen. If those missing features are what you're looking for, y'all'll have to plough to a standard U.S.-based identity-theft-protection service that provides — and charges a lot — for them.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/bitdefender-digital-identity-protection
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