Even if you are often informed about the risks associated with identity theft, you may still have the misconception that it is the kind of unfortunate event that only occurs to other people and not to you personally. On the other hand, identity theft is a possibility if you use the internet and if you ever reveal personal or financial information on the internet (a hint: almost all of us do this). In 2021, Norton LifeLock commissioned The Harris Poll to do research on the topic, and the results showed that 415 million people all across the world were victims of cybercrime. That constitutes a sizeable percentage of the world’s total population of 8 billion people.
By subscribing to an identity theft protection service, you can potentially lessen the likelihood of being a victim of cybercrime and save yourself time and money in the process. If you are thinking about making this purchase, then you will most probably be thinking about LifeLock as well. This service, which is a branch of Norton, monitors your financial accounts as well as your personal information, and it notifies you whenever something about the usage of your information on the internet sounds suspicious.
In this 2022 LifeLock review, I will do my best to respond to a number of concerns that readers frequently ask regarding ID theft protection services in general and LifeLock in particular. These questions will include the following:
• Should I spend the money on Lifelock?
• How does it stack up against similar products offered by other companies such as Identity Guard, Identity Force, Experian, and others?
• How simple is it to put into use?
• What are some of the most important traits that it possesses?
• How helpful is the customer support staff?
In-depth examination of the LifeLock system
If you decide to purchase a subscription to LifeLock, the service will effectively monitor your personal information and online accounts. It also offers services and experts who are ready to assist you in the event that your identity is stolen or lost at any point in the future. It offers insurance to assist you in covering the costs associated with restoring your identity as well as the costs associated with the insurance. In other words, LifeLock is able to fulfil what it advertises it can do.
You could, in theory, execute many of the activities that LifeLock performs on your own by keeping a close eye on your credit report and the statements for your financial accounts in search of any unusual activity. But if you don’t have the time or the willingness to do this, you could find that hiring LifeLock to perform the work for you gives you the peace of mind that you’re looking for.
However, the most significant disadvantage of using LifeLock is that, in comparison to the prices of other identity theft protection services, it can end up costing quite a deal more. However, if you want the peace of mind that comes with the LifeLock brand name, you might be ready to pay a little bit more.
Before I get into the specifics of what I discovered throughout my research, I want to make sure you know that I enrolled to the online security service LifeLock, just as you would. This is not an unique account that LifeLock created for me and filled with fictitious information. I’m going to be using my own personal information. I decided to sign up for LifeLock’s Ultimate Plus plan for a single individual, which comes with a month-to-month fee of $23.99 for the first year. This plan includes a yearly subscription fee of $59.99. (plus sales tax).
The benefits of LifeLock and their insurance
During my hands-on review of LifeLock, I will go through all of the features that are currently available and discuss how they compare to one another.
LifeLock is perhaps best known for the one million dollar identity theft insurance policy that it offers to subscribers in the event that they suffer a breach of their personal information. The marketing materials that LifeLock distributes prominently include this phone number.
However, what does this actually signify? If you experience a loss of your identity while subscribed to any tier of LifeLock’s services, the company will repay you for any costs involved with recovering your identity, up to a maximum of one million dollars, in the form of reimbursements. This could involve expenses like:
• Hiring an attorney
• Hiring a private investigator
• Opening new accounts
• Reimbursement for work hours you have to miss while seeking to recover your identity
• Other out-of-pocket expenses
You will need to produce documentation of these expenses. LifeLock does not merely hand you a huge check. The provider may even dispute some of your claims of expenses, so don’t expect to be able to claim just anything as part of the insurance payout.
Additionally, LifeLock offers another pool of money to reimburse you for any direct monetary thefts you have from your accounts related to the identity theft. Depending on the subscription tier you are utilising, you may be eligible for up to $25,000, up to $100,000, or up to $1 million in reimbursement. Again, you will need to give documentation of these direct losses.
This is one area where LifeLock outshines its ID theft restoration service competitors. Many additional providers combine the insurance payments and the reimbursement payments, offering $1 million total. If you subscribe to LifeLock, you potentially could be entitled for up to $2 million. If you have accounts with considerable quantities of money in them, the extra $1 million for direct financial account reimbursement may be a significant benefit to you.
Activity notifications
Alerts are how LifeLock lets you know when it finds something connected to your personal information that could signal a concern with the protection of your identity. From the alerts page, you may decide exactly how you would like to receive alerts, beyond viewing them in the dashboard. You can request an email, an automated phone call, and a text message, or you can choose to just use one or two of these notification methods.
When you click on an alert, LifeLock explains the alarm and gives you some ideas for how you may wish to deal with it.
When customers are considering subscribing to ID theft protection services, I sometimes observe that they have difficulty in exactly how alerts function. Some individuals believe that when LifeLock sends you an alert, it automatically fixes the problem. This is not the case. It merely warns you of the condition and provides advise how to repair it. It is up to you to take those measures.
Some alerts will show a Chat button that you can click to try to gather more information about the alarm. Understand that the information in the conversation is AI driven at first; you are not conversing with a real human. If you dig deep enough into your questions for the chat-bot, you may ultimately reach a real person, however I never quite could reach a real person in the chats during my experiments.
If desired, you can have LifeLock watch your monitored accounts for any transactions that surpass a specified amount, such as $500, $2,000, or another number. This is a great function, but it is something you can set up and track on your own with most banking and credit card accounts.
Dark web monitoring
The dark web is a criminal marketplace consisting of websites, chat rooms, and other venues where hackers buy and sell stolen personal information. If your personal information is for sale on the dark web, it raises your chances of experiencing identity theft.
My first alert when I signed up for LifeLock linked to a dark web incident. It turned out to be a minor issue, but LifeLock nonetheless offered a thorough explanation of where it got the information and the steps I might take to ward against any prospective difficulties.
Free credit report and monitoring
The Credit option at the top of the dashboard window allows you to check your credit score and to access your credit reports. Depending on the subscription package you are using, you may be able to see reports and scores from all three credit agencies (although LifeLock only reveals your Equifax credit score automatically) (although LifeLock only shows your Equifax credit score automatically).
You may see any open credit inquiries you have too. Checking for strange credit queries related with your personal information is a smart approach to identify the likelihood of a breach of your identity.
The Credit window includes any open accounts you have as well as a computation of your credit utilisation. You can access this material on your own through the credit bureaus, but it is helpful to have LifeLock show all of it for you in this style. LifeLock designs the layout of this page well.
Address monitoring
LifeLock will monitor any attempts that someone makes with the U.S. Postal Service to try to intercept your postal mail by changing your mailing address. LifeLock also maintains track of all your official addresses going back 20-plus years and presents them with your monitored information. If you find an odd address mentioned below, this could signal something is awry with the way someone is using your personal information
Public records monitoring
LifeLock will create an alert for you if it finds any of your personal identifying information in the criminal court system. Someone who stole your identity may not use it to steal money from you. Instead, this person may submit your details to authorities to avoid taking responsibility for a suspected crime.
Social media monitoring
Monitoring of your social media accounts is a relatively new capability in LifeLock. LifeLock will keep an eye out for social media posts related with your account that may show cyber-bullying or hate speech, indicating that someone may be hacking your account.
LifeLock also keeps a check on your account for any profile changes or settings modifications that could suggest a hack. You would receive an alert if any of these things happen. You can join up for tracking social media profiles for:
• YouTube Channel
Just as with your financial accounts, you will need to offer LifeLock the sign-in details for your account. It then will be able to monitor the account for you.
ID restoration
During my time evaluating the LifeLock service, I did not suffer an identity theft incident, thus I could not undertake a hands-on test of this compatibility. (I am not complaining about this fact.)
Should you experience a loss of your identity, you will receive access to a U.S.-based identity recovery expert from LifeLock, who can answer questions and aid to take you through the process of trying to regain your identity.
You will need to call customer service at LifeLock to request aid with recovering your identity. If LifeLock agrees that a hacker stole your identity, it will appoint a specialist to your case.
Understand that you almost probably will need to employ a local attorney to aid you with the legal issues of recovering your identity. LifeLock’s analysts will help with contacting the credit bureaus about the likelihood of some of your credit information being erroneous or being tied to identity theft.
2FA login
LifeLock gives you the option of implementing two-factor authentication (2FA) with your LifeLock account. This means you will need to give a username and password to access your LifeLock account. LifeLock then produces a login code that it provides to you using an authenticator app or through a text message on your smartphone. You also can produce a security key using a USB thumb drive. After providing the required information, such as a code or key, you will be granted access to the account.
Because of this, it is impossible for an unauthorised user to access your account by merely obtaining your password. The hacker would also need access to your smartphone in order to complete their mission.
You may activate two-factor authentication by entering the settings page for your account and scrolling down to the bottom of the page. You are not required to always use two-factor authentication with LifeLock.
Protection for a lost wallet
If someone takes your wallet without your permission or if you misplace it, you could end up losing access to a significant amount of personal information. If you have in the past entered sensitive information such as your driver’s licence number, debit card number, credit card number, and other numbers into the LifeLock dashboard, the customer service representatives at LifeLock will be able to assist you in cancelling your existing cards and obtaining replacements.
Protection against lost or stolen wallets is included at each of the three price tiers.
Notifications in the event of data breaches
In the event that a big corporation discloses that it has been the victim of a significant data breach, LifeLock will send you an alert informing you of the situation, just in case you are a customer of that corporation. After then, you have the option of taking measures to try to prevent the loss of any of your personal information that may have been compromised. This service is offered at each of the three different price tiers.
Registration and initial configuration
The procedure of signing up for and configuring LifeLock is simple. You may get up and running with your fundamental tracking information in a matter of minutes rather than hours.
During the signup process, you will be required to input your credit card information, and you will also be required to agree to the process of automatically renewing your subscription. You will also be required to give some particular personal information, such as the following:
• Name
• Your Personal Identification Number (SSN)
• Birthdate
• Address
• The number to call
• Email address
Once you begin using the service, you will have the option to provide LifeLock with extra information that it can monitor. It’s possible that entering all of your information will take a couple of hours, but it entirely depends on how many accounts you want to monitor.
LifeLock had just introduced the ability to sign up for a free trial that lasts for 30 days. However, in order to make use of the trial period, you will first be required to supply information regarding your payment method. If you opt to remain using LifeLock after the first year, the company will simply discount your total payment by one month.
You do not need to download anything in order to use LifeLock because it operates as cloud software, which means it runs over the Internet in your web browser. In order to make use of LifeLock, you will always be required to have an active internet connection. In addition to that, the internet signal must be rapid and reliable; otherwise, the performance will cause you to become frustrated very quickly. (More on this to come.)
When you are ready to sign in to the LifeLock service, you have the option of generating a one-of-a-kind username and password for your account, or you may link your account to an existing Google or Apple account and sign in using the credentials from that other account.
Design that’s intuitive and easy to utilise
It may be a little bit of a struggle to get to the LifeLock dashboard, despite the fact that the dashboard itself is relatively straightforward to use. After successfully logging in to your account, you will be brought to a screen titled “My Norton.” Through this screen, you will be able to access your other Norton accounts as well as your LifeLock account. If you have any other subscriptions through Norton, you can access these accounts as well.
If, on the other hand, all you want to do is get straight into your LifeLock dashboard, you will need to navigate through a few more windows before you can get there. This is a strange design that is not as straightforward to figure out as it ought to be for the user. On the “My Norton” page, there should simply be a button that can be clicked to access the dashboard. This would be a much better solution.
My internet connection seemed to make the service run a little bit more slowly than I had anticipated it would. When I clicked on a button or tab, there would frequently be a gap of at least a second, sometimes even more. When you are accustomed to almost instantaneous responses from websites, the pauses can be a little frustrating. This is probably due to the stringent security measures that are in place for your data in LifeLock; however, when you are accustomed to these types of responses, the pauses can be a little annoying.
In addition, there were instances when LifeLock would automatically log me out of my account after ten or fifteen minutes, and this occurred regardless of whether or not I was actively using the account and clicking between screens. This is done, for obvious reasons related to security, so that you don’t accidentally leave your LifeLock account open on a screen where another person could view it and start clicking on buttons. However, if you are working on a personal computer at home, it would be convenient if you could disable this option.
LifeLock dashboard
Once you have reached the dashboard for LifeLock, it is simple to locate the information that you require. You will have rapid access to your credit score, any alerts you may have, and the current status of your identity lock. You can start entering information into various LifeLock features with the press of a button, even if you haven’t used them yet because you have the option to do so.
When you first start exploring the various features on the dashboard, if you see a grey circle with a I in the middle of it, you can hover the cursor over it to see extra information about that particular feature.
You can quickly navigate to a more specialised topic by clicking on any of the tabs that are located along the top of the dashboard window. On the tabs, you’ll find:
• Alerts
• Credit
• Locking Your Identity
• Transactions
• The Restoring of IDs
• Information That Is Being Supervised
LifeLock support
Clicking the Service button at the very top of the window gives you access to the various customer support options that LifeLock provides on practically every screen. You have access to a wide variety of self-help and assistance options with LifeLock. If you are ready to navigate through a significant number of windows, you will finally arrive at an option to engage in live chat. You also have the option of sending a message via Facebook or Twitter to the customer care team in an effort to speak with a real person.
You can get help through phone with LifeLock whenever you need it, 24 hours a day, seven days a week; but, you will need to navigate through several screens before you can locate the number to contact. You will also be required to input certain information regarding your account in order to acquire a verification code. This code is required to be entered before you are able to connect with a customer support person over the phone.
When I made some test phone calls, I was frequently required to wait anywhere from two to five minutes before being connected to an agent. Since customer service is not typically a focus for the majority of identity theft protection businesses, I honestly regarded this degree of reaction as being pretty good. I believe that LifeLock restricts the number of individuals who call with general queries by making you go through so many hurdles before you can get the customer support phone number. This allows more agents to be available to deal with legitimate customer service and technical support concerns.
It is important to note that LifeLock sends a significant number of unsolicited email messages, both during the active period of your subscription and after it has been terminated. After I had signed up for the service, I received approximately one email message per day, which included various material, such as newsletters and recommendations on how to make use of the service. These communications were distinct from any alert messages that may have been received.
If you find these kinds of persistent notifications to be really unpleasant, you do have the ability, within the confines of your account settings, to opt out of receiving some of them altogether. You are not able to entirely stop the messages from appearing. Getting these kinds of letters is simply a part of the package when you join up for a lot of different identity theft protection services; however, it appears that Norton-operated businesses like LifeLock send them a lot more frequently than other organisations do.
Confirming and adding to the information that was monitored
You can always access the information that is being monitored by LifeLock by clicking on the Monitored Info tab that is located at the very top of the screen whenever you are unsure which information you submitted into LifeLock for monitoring. You can include more information that you want to track by selecting a link on this page and adding it to your dashboard. You also have the ability to make changes to any of the information that is being watched on this page.
It will just take a few minutes of your time if you want to join a financial account to LifeLock so that it may begin monitoring your activities from that account. This will allow the service to keep a check on the account in question. However, you cannot simply add your account number, such as for a credit card account or a mortgage account, and have LifeLock start monitoring the account for you. This is because LifeLock requires additional information to do so.
Instead, you will be need to already have an online account with the financial institution that you wish to monitor in order to access their monitoring tools. After that, in order to grant LifeLock access to your information, you will be required to input your login details for that online account. This results in a little bit of additional work for users who don’t already have online accounts for their financial accounts. If this is the case, you will first need to establish an online account with your financial institution, and then you will be able to add that information to your LifeLock profile.
In the two most expensive pricing tiers, LifeLock gives you the ability to monitor your bank accounts, including your checking and savings accounts as well as your credit card accounts. Only accounts in the most expensive pricing tier will have their 401(k)s and other investments monitored by it.
The Cost of Using LifeLock
Before I get into the specifics of how much a LifeLock subscription will cost you, I feel obligated to point out that the company gives first-time clients a considerable price break on its products and services. This promotion gives you a discount for a full year before you have to start paying the regular price again. The majority of the pricing tiers receive a reduction of between 25% and 40%.
Although this promotion may entice you to join up for LifeLock, you are going to be in for a rude awakening when the price of your subscription goes up significantly in the second year and beyond. For the purpose of calculating the prices shown in this chart, I have chosen to disregard the introductory pricing reduction. It is my opinion that the vast majority of people who are interested in subscribing to an identity theft protection programme are seeking for a commitment of some length, which makes the one-year discount less appealing. It’s not that I have a problem with paying less money initially for LifeLock; nevertheless, it is essential that you have a clear understanding of exactly what you will be up against in terms of payments in the future.
Options for automatic renewal
When you sign up for LifeLock, you will be asked to consent to the service’s ongoing practise of automatically renewing your subscription. This indicates that LifeLock will automatically charge the payment method associated with your account each time the subscription for your account is due to be renewed.
This is a little irritation because it increases the likelihood that you will forget to terminate the account until it is already too late to do so. It is especially aggravating when the price increase for the second year of a LifeLock subscription is so significant. Because of the auto-renewal policies, you run the risk of incurring charges that were not intended.
After you have subscribed to LifeLock, you will have the option to disable the automatic renewal feature at any time; but, if you do so, you may no longer be able to take advantage of certain savings that are available to you for other Norton products. If you want to disable Norton’s automatic renewal feature, doing so will put you at a disadvantage.
How do you cancel LifeLock?
It can be difficult to cancel an identity theft restoration service such as LifeLock once it has been activated. Cancelling your LifeLock subscription is possible; however, in order to do so, you will need to either give LifeLock a call or submit your request through their live chat support.
After completing my review, I had an easy time cancelling my LifeLock subscription. The process was really straightforward. On average, it took ten minutes to complete.
Instead of picking up the phone, I used the function that allowed me to cancel the chat. During the initial few minutes of my session, I was forced to deal with an AI chat-bot that was unable to validate my account. After that, it offered me the chance to talk to a real person, which I gladly accepted.
Even after I was able to connect with a real person through chat, I was required to go through a few more steps before it was confirmed that I intended to cancel. Despite this, I was surprised at how smoothly the procedure proceeded. Regarding the cancellation, I was sent an email message that confirmed my cancellation. LifeLock delivered on their promise that I would no longer have charges incurred on my credit card, and they kept their word. I cannot promise that your attempts to cancel will go as smoothly as mine did, but I was astonished by how simple the procedure was to complete.
Even if you have cancelled your subscription to LifeLock, you will continue to have access to the service until the end of the term for which you have paid. (During this time, you can anticipate receiving many emails from LifeLock requesting that you revisit the website and reactivate your subscription.) You are only eligible for a refund of your payment if you have an annual subscription and submit your request within the first sixty days of having signed up for the service.
Read the LifeLock terms of service as well as the LifeLock cancellation and refund policy before you sign up for the LifeLock service. This will provide you with important information. This material may be updated at any time; thus, you should always check these pages to ensure you have the most recent policy.
Pricing tiers for LifeLock services
LifeLock provides three distinct price plans, each of which includes three tiers of pricing for customers to choose from. These are the three different pricing plans:
• Individual
• There are two adults total
• Maximum of two adults and a maximum of five children
The following are the different pricing tiers that are included within these three plans:
• Standard: If you subscribe to the Standard tier, you will save money; however, this tier only tracks a limited amount of your identifiable information, such as your Social Security Number. If you want to track all of your personally identifiable information, you should subscribe to the Premium tier instead.
• Advantage: If you choose the Advantage tier, in addition to the elements included in the Standard tier, you will also receive an annual credit report from one of the major credit bureaus and monitoring of your bank accounts.
• Ultimate Plus: The Ultimate Plus tier is going to be the greatest choice for the vast majority of people because it offers monitoring in a broad variety of different aspects relating to your identification. However, the cost is quite high. (As was said earlier, this evaluation will focus on the Ultimate Plus plan.)
LifeLock’s advantages and disadvantages
Pros:
• Offers identity theft insurance with coverage of up to one million dollars across all price levels
• Its most expensive plan will reimburse you for lost or stolen money up to a maximum of one million dollars.
• The design of the dashboard is solid.
• The company’s namesake, Norton, is one of the most recognisable brands in the computer security industry
• There is support for customers available 24 hours a day, seven days a week
• Offers new users a sizeable discount on their membership fees for the first year
• Lives up to its claims regarding the monitoring functions that it offers
• Recently added social media and payday loans monitoring features
• Recently added a 30-day introductory free trial period
• Credit report information is thorough and easy to read
• Can add as many or as few financial accounts for tracking as you want
• Phone support response times are a little shorter than I expected
• Can be up and running with the fundamentals for LifeLock within several minutes
• Protects your account with a combination of a password and a one-time password
Cons:
• Beginning in the second year, there will be a major increase in pricing, which will exceed that of competitors.
• After the first year, their charges are significantly more than those of competing identity theft protection services
• There is a discernible delay after clicking on buttons on the dashboard.
• It can be difficult to locate the customer service phone number in order to contact support.
• The security feature that automatically logs users out is quite aggressive.
• Produces an overwhelming quantity of unsolicited marketing emails sent by email.
• The most affordable plan is really fundamental, and it does not include financial account monitoring.
Our concluding thoughts about LifeLock
During the course of my in-depth examination of LifeLock, I discovered that the company lives up to its claims regarding the warnings and monitoring capabilities it provides in order to safeguard the identifying information it stores on you. The simplicity of use of certain of the company’s features may be overstated in the marketing materials that it distributes, but the actual service delivers on the fundamentals of what it offers.
The dashboard that you will use to adjust the settings of your account as well as to view the notifications and information pertaining to your account is well-designed. The vast majority of the information that LifeLock provides you with is not only straightforward to comprehend but also helpful.
It is quite convenient to be able to view all of your credit information in the same location where you may receive alerts about any unusual conditions relating to your personal information.
The cost of using LifeLock is the service’s most significant downside. When compared to the costs of competing identity theft protection programmes, LifeLock is much more expensive, and this difference becomes even more pronounced after the first-year pricing discount expires.
When you understand that you almost probably have to subscribe to the highest pricing tier of LifeLock in order to acquire the features that you actually want from a service of this type, the cost issue becomes a significant concern for you.
There are a few reasons why you might be willing to shell out more money to become a member of LifeLock as opposed to signing up for a less expensive ID theft protection service. I think it’s great that LifeLock would reimburse you up to a million dollars if your identity is stolen and someone uses it to steal money from your bank accounts or other financial assets. When compared to other identity theft protection programmes, this is a considerable advantage, particularly for individuals who retain a significant amount of money in their accounts.
In addition, the LifeLock service has the most well-known brand name among identity theft protection services, which may provide you with the piece of mind that it will be around for a good number of years into the foreseeable future. I have no doubt that the most of the main identity theft protection services will continue to operate for a considerable amount of time into the foreseeable future; but, some individuals are merely more at ease with a brand name that they are familiar with.
In a nutshell, if you are going to shell out cash for an identity theft protection service, you should really take into consideration LifeLock as an option. It fulfils its obligation to provide you with the notifications and information it promises to deliver concerning your personal information. On the other hand, the substantial cost involved in the second year and beyond ought to make you think again. If you choose to go with LifeLock, you should be aware that the amount you spend on it will be significantly greater than the norm when compared to the prices of its rivals. When weighed against those of its rivals, I’m not convinced that its comprehensive feature set justifies the higher price tag.
