The foundation of any kind of review is trust. You have to trust that what I’m giving you is an unbiased commentary on the service or product. So when I did this Identity Guard review, which is for an identity monitoring service, I was surprised when they tried to block me from publishing it. Here’s the review and the story behind why I won’t promote them anymore.
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It’s worth your time to be proactive about your identity monitoring instead of reactive.
It’s pretty standard for all of the best identity monitoring services to offer $1 million in ID theft insurance, but if you get to the point that you’re trying to make use of that insurance policy, you’ve already lost the game.
In fact, if you’re just waiting around for somebody to steal your identity, you’re falling behind. You can proactively remove your personal data online or freeze your credit NOW.
For this reason, my priority in this review is looking at the monitoring features more than the theft recovery features. For one thing, I thankfully haven’t had to use their recovery services and insurance, but also, we have more control over how to prevent identity fraud than we do actual theft recovery.
What Does Identity Guard Do?
So what does a service like Identity Guard even do? The best way to answer that is to just let you see my dashboard.
Right off the bat, you see that I have 8 alerts, which I’ll explain in a moment, along with my credit score and my credit report. I’ve also installed their little browser extension that blocks phishing sites, insecure sites, and ads. I can also have them review my social media privacy settings to let me know where there might be cause for concern. Again, I’ll show you what they’ve found in a moment.
Finally, they provide a place to find how to create credit freezes and then store any freeze PINs. And if you saw my video last month, you know that I highly recommend doing a credit freeze not just on your account, but also for your spouse and kids.
And speaking of my wife and kids, you’ll see that I’m also monitoring the data for all three of them. Identity Guard allows you to add every adult who resides at your home address and as many kids for whom you are a parent or guardian.
Trusting Identity Guard with Your Info
Now that’s the dashboard. But what you didn’t see was all the information I entrusted to Identity Guard so that they can alert me if they find it anywhere. That includes very personal things like my social security number, my date of birth, address, credit card number (not necessarily all of my virtual credit card numbers, though), driver’s license number, and even my passport number.
This kind of trust is required for any identity monitoring service you use and that’s why it’s super-important that you choose a company you feel comfortable with. I’ll give you more background info on Identity Guard and the parent company Aura in a moment.
But once they have this info, they monitor for any kind of fraudulent usage and alert you to what they find.
Identity Monitoring Alerts
So let’s look at the alerts I’ve received so far.
The high risk alerts you see here happened when I was working with my bank, which is Chase, to fix something on my account. I had called them up and since I’m overseas, I had to go through a number of different verification processes. This, unbeknownst to me at the time, triggered some sort of ID verification transaction, and this came up as an alert after I hung up the phone.
It’s important to stop and note that for the sake of this All Things Secured brand, I’ve actually signed up for a couple different identity monitoring services, many of which are brand names you’ve probably heard of before. But when Chase did an ID check on me, the only monitoring service that alerted me was Identity Guard. This, among other things, is one of the reasons they’ve become my go-to recommendation for identity and credit monitoring services.
Now if I scroll down here, you’ll see that they also went through all my social media posts and alerted me to anything that might be inappropriate or might reflect poorly on me. Honestly, all of these were pretty humorous to me and nothing I ended up changing, but I can see where this might bring up something you forgot you posted 10 years ago that you should probably take down now for the sake of future employment.
I should mention that I also get these alerts on my phone since I downloaded the Identity Guard app. The app does pretty much everything you saw on my desktop dashboard, including tracking my VantageScore Credit Score, notifying me of new alerts and allowing me to add new pieces of information to my watch list.
Can You Trust Identity Guard (and Aura)?
But again, we’re going back to this issue of trust. I’m trusting this one company with a lot of my data, so it’s important to me that I know who they are. So let’s dive into that a bit.
First things first, Identity Guard is a product of a company called Aura, which was officially formed in 2019 by the combination of an antivirus brand called Intrusta and this identity monitoring brand Identity Guard. Now, this ID monitoring service has been around for more than 20 years, at least according to their website, and they’re very transparent about their leadership and company structure. I personally feel pretty confident using their service because I’m not aware of any data breaches in the past, and they’re consistently recognized by the Online Trust Alliance for their best practices in data security and privacy.
That being said, my one hesitation with Aura has to do with their suite of products. I remember when LifeLock was acquired by Norton, and all of the sudden I was being upsold on every Norton product under the sun. I was no longer a LifeLock member, I was a Norton LifeLock member and they wanted me to buy their antivirus software, their VPN software and anything else they could think up. It was annoying, quite frankly, and it was the primary reason I left them.
Now Aura hasn’t done that…yet. But they’re positioning themselves to do exactly the same thing. So this is my message to Aura if you’re watching this – I like your identity monitoring product, I really do. But if you go down the same path as LifeLock and use my subscription with Identity Guard to market all your Anti-virus, all your VPNs and who knows what other products to me, I’m not going to be happy. I purchased Identity Guard because I needed an identity monitoring service. That’s all.
Do I Recommend Identity Guard?
As I close up this review, let me be clear about two things.
- First, there’s not much being offered with Identity Guard – or with any identity monitoring service for that matter – that you can’t do yourself. You can set your own credit freezes, check your own credit reports for free and many banks now even offer ID monitoring, although it’s usually only with one credit bureau and not all three.
- Second, you need to understand what a service like Identity Guard can’t do. They can’t prevent identity or credit fraud, they simply provide timely alerts so you can fix it as fast as possible. And that kind of speed is key to recovering from identity theft. Also, they don’t correct errors on your credit report, they just show it to you.
In the end, though, my recommendation is this: if you know yourself well enough to know that you won’t take the time to check your credit report and you won’t go through the trouble of setting up your own credit freezes, then paying $100 a year to monitor you and your family is a no-brainer.
Behind the Scenes: Why I DON’T Recommend Them
Ok, let explain why I’m no longer working with Identity Guard despite this obviously positive review.
I’m going to be very transparent with you here because the more that this brand grows, the more important it is that I maintain my credibility with you, my audience. I don’t hide the fact that I have an affiliate relationship with many of the companies I promote.
What this means is that whenever you purchase a product through my link, I am sometimes compensated by that company. I’m required by the FTC to disclose that relationship, and I do.
Obviously this type of affiliate marketing can be abused, and the only way to make it work is if I, the creator, can build enough trust with you so that you know that I’m only promoting the things I actually use and companies I believe in. Otherwise, I’m just promoting whoever pays me the most, and unfortunately that does happen.
One potential problem is that some companies think that because they’re paying me, they have control over the content I create. And that’s what’s happened here.
Some companies think that because they pay me, they have control over the content I create.
Identity Guard mandated that they be allowed to edit my review and anything I write about them, or else they wouldn’t pay me for any customers I refer. They incorrectly assumed that the money is what mattered most to me, and in the process showed me their true colors as a company.
They were blurring the lines between independent affiliate and contracted marketer, and I’m not comfortable with that.
Why Identity Guard Tried to Block my Review
Based on email correspondence with them, their view is that they’re concerned about FTC compliance and making sure that what I say about their product is accurate . And I get that.
But I can’t do my job, building trust with you, if they can’t trust me. Does that make sense?
And understand that FTC compliance and product accuracy is my responsibility, not theirs. My credibility is damaged if I don’t disclose my affiliate relationship and if my review is full of errors, not theirs. I’ve worked with over 50 different companies as an affiliate over the years, including other identity monitoring services, and do you know how many of them have required a legal review process? Only one.
Honestly, it makes me a bit mad, but I’m not going back to change this review to be a negative one, because that too would reveal some sort of affiliate bias. So instead, I’ve left it here with this asterisk to explain why I won’t continue to promote a service that I enjoy using from a company that I don’t respect.