Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection review

Our Verdict

Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection scans the dark spider web for your data, monitors your online footprint and reports information breaches. Information technology tin proceed yous from becoming an identity-theft statistic, simply information technology tin't help you with credit monitoring.

For

• Open and dark-web scans of your identity
• Supports up to five email addresses
• Reports new data breaches
• Reasonably priced
• Doesn't demand your Social Security or credit-card info

Against

• No credit monitoring, identity-theft insurance or postal service-theft assistance
• Failed to notify of a significant data breach

Tom's Guide Verdict

Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection scans the night web for your information, monitors your online footprint and reports data breaches. It can keep you from becoming an identity-theft statistic, only information technology can't help you with credit monitoring.

Pros

• +

  Open and nighttime-web scans of your identity

• +

  Supports up to five email addresses

• +

  Reports new information breaches

• +

  Reasonably priced

• +

  Doesn't demand your Social Security or credit-card info

Cons

• -

  No credit monitoring, identity-theft insurance or post-theft assistance

• -

  Failed to notify of a significant data alienation

Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection: Specs

Frequency of credit reports: None
Frequency of credit scores: None
Credit-improvement simulator: No
Accost-change monitoring: No
Data breach alerts: Yeah
Investment account monitoring: No
Medical records monitoring: No
Payday loan monitoring: No
Sex offender alert: No
Security software: No
Title-change alerts: No
Two-factor authentication: Yep

Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection adds a layer of security and privacy by focusing on monitoring your online identity and augmenting any traditional antivirus program. However, considering it provides no credit monitoring or identity-theft insurance, it's not quite on the same playing field as LifeLock, IdentityForce and other full-featured identity theft protection services.

Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection scans the open and night web to run into how far your online identity extends, alerts yous to new data breaches and checks for impostors posing as you on social media.

Unlike another identity-monitoring services, it doesn't need your Social Security or credit-card numbers. Instead, it bases its evaluations on upwardly to 5 email addresses that you lot provide. This makes Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection a reasonably priced and unintrusive choice toward keeping your identity your own.

Read on for the remainder of our Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection review.

Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection: Costs and what's covered

Bitdefender'southward Digital Identity Protection tin can't compare with the all-time identity-theft protection services, such as LifeLock Ultimate Plus, Identity IQ Secure Max or IdentityForce UltraSecure + Credit. Those all include features such as credit monitoring, credit reports and scores, identity-theft insurance and legal communication should your identity be stolen. Some likewise monitor financial accounts, court records and fifty-fifty holding-title changes.

Those full-fledged identity-theft-protection services can cost a few hundred dollars per year. Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection is a budget-friendly alternative that focuses on misuse of your personal information online. It costs $79.99 per twelvemonth — one-half off for the beginning year — or $7.99 a month, and it can monitor up to five digital personas. That's for a single individual, equally there is no family unit plan.

Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection: How nosotros tested

During the late summertime 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 heart on my online identity using a Lenovo ThinkPad T470 Windows laptop, a Samsung Galaxy Notation twenty Android phone and an Apple tree iPad Pro.

Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection: Monitoring

Bitdefender's Digital Identity Protection works below the surface. It keeps an eye on your online persona using information from PIPL, a leading "people finder" service that mines the internet for openly bachelor information on individuals. Digital Identity Protection tin runway your online identity based on up to five email accounts and three telephone numbers that y'all provide.

Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection's most innovative service mapped my online footprint, showing me the online services I had signed upwards for. This can help find someone absconding with my online identity but is besides a handy way to find services I no longer use. On the downside, it missed several online accounts I currently accept, establish others I was unfamiliar with and didn't notify me when I deliberately inverse a countersign.

The service scans the open up as well equally the dark web. Both scans might turn up artifacts of your identity, like birthdays, addresses and phone numbers, in an illegal data broker'due south files or in a nefarious database of personal data.

If you lot employ antivirus software like Norton 360 Deluxe or Trend Micro Maximum Security, a major identity-theft-protection service similar Identity IQ, LifeLock or IdentityForce, or fifty-fifty some countersign managers such as Dashlane or Keeper, you lot already get this type of night-web monitoring. However, Bitdefender says Digital Identity Protection uses machine learning techniques to observe patterns other services might miss.

What Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection doesn't do is just every bit of import. Dissimilar LifeLock, IdentityForce or other full-fledged identity-theft-protection services, Digital Identity Protection doesn't insure y'all confronting losses from identity theft or help you with legal advice. Digital Identity Protection also lacks credit-bureau monitoring that can exist the first sign something is awry with your identity. All these are features that U.S. consumers are eager for.

Over the course of a calendar month of daily use, I used Bitdefender Digital Identity Protect to cheque my online footprint, look for information breaches and monitor my social-media presence for imposters. I received two notifications via email well-nigh breaches and insecurities, but nothing turned out to be dangerous.

Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection: Services and notifications

Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection lets yous know when ane of your service providers has had a data breach. Knowing this might prompt you to change your countersign or cancel the service.

Even so, Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection failed to notify me of the massive T-Mobile data breach, which was all over the news during my testing period. Because I have used T-Mobile for a decade, my association with the wireless carrier did prove upwardly on my Digital Footprint, just in that location was nothing about the alienation. (I had already inverse my T-Mobile login information.)

The service also keeps an eye out for social-media impersonators on thirty pop sites ranging from Facebook to Twitter. It found nobody trying to be me, only information technology'south good that Digital Identity Protection is on the sentinel for this.

One time a week, Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection puts all this information together and emails y'all a study. My most contempo report showed that the service had performed 12 checks over the calendar week and had identified four possible impersonations and 33 possible data breaches. It too linked to an article nigh account takeovers — light simply useful reading.

Unlike traditional identity-theft-protection services that tin can aid you 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 aid fix such bug, that would enhance its impact and information technology would make more sense to position it every bit a premium service.

Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection: Setup

Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection is 1 of the quickest identity-theft-protection services to fix considering there's nothing to download or install. It's all done online through the Bitdefender Central web portal.

I began by signing up for the service, afterwards which I was emailed an activation lawmaking.

(Epitome credit: Bitdefender)

Clicking the link embedded in the activation code took me to my Bitdefender Central business relationship, which showed a clarification of the service and the personal data I needed to provide to sign up.

(Image credit: Bitdefender)

I and then entered my name, electronic mail address and phone number. You can provide up to iii phone numbers, and the system can deal with both mobile and landline connections.

(Image credit: Bitdefender)

To verify that I was authorized to provide my own information, each registration of an email accost or telephone number required me to enter temporary codes that were sent to me via email, text message or automated phone call.

(Image credit: Bitdefender)

Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection so got to work, searching for my data online. The plan presented me with a rapid-fire sequence of $.25 personal data it establish: addresses, alternate email accounts and telephone numbers, sometime jobs, schools and my age. It as well found ii phone numbers and a website that I didn't recognize, just the service generally was on target. From outset to stop, the setup procedure took nearly 10 minutes.

(Image credit: Bitdefender)

If I e'er need to add together new email accounts or telephone numbers, it'southward quick and easy. The "+" symbol in the upper correct of the interface leads to a information-entry screen.

(Prototype credit: Bitdefender)

Bitdefender said all the personal data I provided was encrypted on Bitdefender's servers. If you decide to cancel Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection, the company promises to hold the data for upwardly to half dozen months, then wipe it. Bitdefender support technicians can besides erase any of or all your personal data from the company servers.

(Image credit: Bitdefender)

The service offers 2-cistron authentication (2FA) to protect your business relationship from attackers who might know your password, though information technology'due south hard to effigy out where in the Bitdefender Central interface to set up up the 2FA selection. Click your email address in the upper right corner, and then select "Bitdefender Account." You lot'll be taken to a dissimilar page and may have to log in once again. Select "Countersign and Security" to turn on 2FA.

(Image credit: Bitdefender)

Meanwhile, Bitdefender provides 24/7 tech back up as well every bit an extensive online area with FAQs and suggestions for being proactive nearly online protection. Its Education department has recent articles on identity theft and digital security.

Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection: Interface

Digital Identity Protection has no software and lives within your Bitdefender Central online account. It fits right into the Bitdefender Primal main page below the Dashboard and My Devices, just in a higher place the Parental Command, Premium Services and My Subscriptions sections. Withal, there isn't a direct link to Digital Identity Protection from the well-known Bitdefender antivirus programs.

(Image credit: Bitdefender)

The Dashboard is overflowing with information. There are areas with the basics (name, address and a summary of the data breaches), detailed data (social media identities) and oddities (how big my online customs is compared to the average). In fact, there's so much information, y'all'd have to zoom out the browser to nearly 33% to meet it all at once.

(Prototype credit: Bitdefender)

Using the Bitdefender Central web interface on my Samsung Milky way Note 20 phone felt cramped, and items similar the Impersonation Check tab were truncated. I didn't have any other choice, nonetheless, because the Bitdefender Central mobile app didn't include the Digital Identity Protection details.

(Image credit: Bitdefender)

Regardless of whether yous're using a phone, tablet or notebook, the Digital Footprint tab showed me the online services and websites that I was signed upward with. There's a blank department for images that made me blench with apprehension.

(Image credit: Bitdefender)

Meanwhile, the Information Breaches section shows break-ins at online services I've used, along with suggestions on how to mitigate the risk of futurity data breaches. The Impersonation Check promises to notify me if someone tries to abscond with my identity. Make sure the switch at the top of the page for email alerts is turned on, or you might never find out if someone does. The service constitute a Flickr account that belonged not to me, simply to someone who shares my name.

Epitome i of 2

(Paradigm credit: Bitdefender)

Epitome 2 of 2

(Image credit: Bitdefender)

The Didactics 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.

(Image credit: Bitdefender)

Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection review: Lesser line

A unique security product that augments traditional antivirus apps past alerting you almost potential identity theft and online impersonators, Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection can take your online privacy to a higher level.

While information technology can assist with identity monitoring, the service ignores credit monitoring and offers no insurance protection or assistance if your identity is stolen, features that U.Southward.-based identity-theft-protection services charge a lot for.

The all-time part is that the service doesn't require you to divulge your Social Security number or credit card numbers, every bit traditional identity-theft-protection services would.

But while information technology does a good task of identity monitoring, the service ignores credit monitoring and offers no insurance protection or help if your identity is stolen. If those missing features are what yous're looking for, you'll take to turn to a standard U.S.-based identity-theft-protection service that provides — and charges a lot — for them.

Brian Nadel is a freelance writer and editor who specializes in technology reporting and reviewing. He works out of the suburban New York City area and has covered topics from nuclear ability plants and Wi-Fi routers to cars and tablets. The old editor-in-chief of Mobile Computing and Communications, Nadel is the recipient of the TransPacific Writing Honor.

Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/bitdefender-digital-identity-protection

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