The information you supply to companies and others about yourself like your health records, birthdate, driver’s license, social security number, and home address is your personal information. It used to be that this information was relatively safe because it was not online – instead it was tucked in a file in a business office where someone would have to break into the building or work there physically to steal your information. Nowadays, all you and your family’s personally identifiable information is online and stored on various government and company servers, their business partner servers and the business partners of all those business partners such that pretty much everyone knows it all. When any of these groups has a breach, it means your information is pretty much public knowledge and once it’s available it can’t be recovered or retracted.
We have had so many major breaches against our credit history, our health records, our tax filings, our activities and connections. Just because your identity hasn’t been stolen yet or that nothing outright bad has happened to you yet doesn’t mean you weren’t impacted because the impact can be subtle or even go undetected. You know about the not so subtle warning signs of identity theft like a credit card issue or bills for items you didn’t buy, or an alert from a credit monitoring website about a line of credit you didn’t open but what about someone pretending to be you if arrested or even just using your information to setup an account on an extremist political site? Perhaps your job application was denied even after all your interviews were positive or perhaps someone sets up a social media account in your name then sends friend requests to your distant friend across the country and begins to mess with your life. How would you ever know? What can you do to protect yourself and your family? You can keep closer tabs on your digital life.
You can take some proactive measures to protect your family and you from identity theft but it can only go so far because once you hand that information over in an online form to businesses and the services that we use, our personal information is literally out of our hands and now must be protected by someone else. This is where a good identity theft service comes in handy by monitoring the web and keeping you notified if your information falls into the wrong hands.
The main purpose of identity theft services is keeping you and your family safe from financial loss and reputation damage sustained from the malicious use of your personal information. In fact, it doesn’t have to be any malicious use, it could just be collecting information about you and your connections to sell to others. Protecting who you are defined by your personal information is simply fundamental to your digital self. The good news is identity theft protection services are available. Good identity theft protection should start with an identity theft service that has a good reputation and solid security measures. Identity theft protection services should include scanning the web and monitoring credit bureaus, social media sites and the darkweb for any activity using your information. Getting alerts when any one of your personal information details is discovered especially for things like court and arrest records or if your SSN is associated with a new name is important. These identity theft services typically provide tools to help combat theft like thwarting phishing attempts for your personal information through social media accounts even flagging unacceptable posts. Others include other benefits like insurance policies and reimbursement of stolen funds from important accounts like your 401K or your home’s title information. Some even guarantee a “100% identity theft resolution”.
The Mega Review scores below are based on an aggregation of reviews by leading experts and top reviewers on the features each feels is important to identity theft protection. The list below helps to understand the benefits of the top identity theft protection services so you can decide what features are important to your situation.
*Note: Some products and services listed include compensated affiliated links.
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