Do any of you pay a monitoring service to check your online profile, fraud, tracking, or credit monitoring? Do you choose the better service of eliminating your info, etc.. or just notifying you?
Transunion had a fraud alert and I received IDX for a year. Just the basic service (Notifications of dark web personal stuff, fraud, credt, etc..). Notifications, but if I want them to delete my stuff on dark web or do something about fraud, that is extra. The extra would include, cyber scan, credit monitoring, identity theft, block tracking, etc.. --AND fixing the problems.
My IDX subscription expires on the 18th. I can’t decide if I should pay for this service. If I do, I think I should get the extra service that takes care of any problems listed above. IDX for charge $16.95 a month for extras.
I would welcome your comments and recommendations.
I have two of those. One because my employers includes it with the legal insurance I opted in to as a benefit. The other because a few years ago the University of California leaked a whole bunch of its employees’ PIO (and worse yet, employee family members’ PIO) and it ended up on the dark web with people falling victim to identity theft. UC afraid to be met by an epic class action, tried to buy itself peace by offering “free” monitoring service to all its employees and their family members.
I have to say, rarely before have I for a free service felt the saying be so true: you get what you paid for. Although I receive a ton of email from this service, I have yet to see any sign that it actually does anything to protect me or my privacy or remove any data that’s already out there. For all I know, I just handed them a whole bunch of super sensitive personal information and when they finally get hacked (not if, when) I’ll be double screwed.
There is an alternative though that makes me hopeful. At least as a resident of the state of CA. Thanks to recent new state law, folks can now sign up to have data brokers be required to remove their personal information on a recurrent basis, and report to those affected on the progress of that removal, i.e. brokers’ compliance with said privacy laws.
More information on this DROP program be found here:
CA residents can sign up now. Data removal will start in Aug of this year.