Robust Total Protection plan
Additional alerts and reports, like a registered offender list
Sells data to third parties
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PrivacyGuard is an online service that monitors your credit and provides identity theft protection. We were a little put off by the almost $25 per month for the Total Protection plan, especially considering language in the privacy policy states that data is “shared” with third parties.
PrivacyGuard does what it says and gives you a comprehensive overview of all of your data. The big question is, is it worth it?
| Price | $9.99–$24.99/mo |
| Identity theft insurance | Up to $1 million |
| Credit monitoring | Yes |
| Credit reports | Yes — Experian, TransUnion, Equifax |
| Credit score | Yes |
| Identity recovery | Yes |
| Dark web alerts | Yes |
| Social media account alerts | No |
| Learn more | Get Privacy Guard |
"The two biggest caveats we have are with the price and the data sale. We don’t believe the Credit or Identity Protection plans are worth their costs on their own, but Total Protection is comprehensive and likely more worth the high price tag. Selling your data, on the other hand, is something that makes PrivacyGuard a no-go for us."
Privacy Guard offers a robust list of credit and ID monitoring, reporting, and recovery services for you and your children. The cheapest plan, Identity Protection, is about $10 a month and covers identity theft protection only.
The features offered with this plan are useful, with Privacy Guard monitoring your Social Security number, bank account, and credit and debit cards, as well as other areas that could be compromised. Some of these features help you keep an eye on your credit, but for true credit monitoring, you’ll need to choose the Credit Protection or Total Protection plans.
The Credit Protection plan jumps to about $20 a month and monitors the big three credit bureaus: Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. There really isn’t much else other than credit monitoring involved in this tier. There are free apps like Credit Karma that do basically the same thing without costing you anything, so we weren’t that impressed with the credit monitoring plan.
If you want both credit monitoring and identity protection, the Total Protection plan costs a whopping $25 or so a month, which is pretty pricey. The three main credit bureaus allow you to register for free credit monitoring on their sites, and free scanners like HelloPrivacy can help with identity protection. But if you’d like the security of the $1 million in insurance, the Total Protection plan may be a good choice for you.
This plan is a combination of both the Identity Protection and Credit Protection plans, so you get what’s offered in each plan plus a few extras like a registered offender locator and reduced pre-approved credit card offers. Since each plan on its own has underwhelming features, this is your best bet for comprehensive protection.
Overall, it seems like PrivacyGuard’s price tag is a little more per month than we’d be comfortable paying considering you can piecemeal most of the features together with low or no-cost options like Credit Karma.
For the sake of covering all protections provided, we’re going to list the situations PrivacyGuard protects against on the Total Protection plan. While the Identity and Credit Protection plans can be purchased separately, the Total Protection plan includes features found in both of those plans plus additional features that come only with Total Protection. These include:
A lot of the features found in PrivacyGuard come pretty standard with identity protection services, but there were a few we appreciated that were extras.
Since schools are such a hot target for ransomware criminals, we now have to worry about children's Social Security numbers being compromised before they turn 18. The addition of monitoring kids’ credit is a really nice feature. We were also impressed with the neighborhood reports that give you information on just about any neighborhood in the U.S. — and the registered offender list that can alert you if a registered offender moves into your neighborhood.
PrivacyGuard uses the VantageScore reported by Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion and provides you with daily credit monitoring and a monthly credit score.
The bureau credit monitoring feature checks for changes to your credit report and alerts you if it spots any. If you receive an alert for changes you didn’t make, PrivacyGuard helps you assess and remediate these changes with its identity theft protection services. This feature includes $1 million in ID theft insurance as well as online fraud assistance.
Alerts you’ll receive with credit monitoring include but are not limited to:
PrivacyGuard sends monthly credit score reports so you can monitor for inaccuracies or potential identity theft. The service also wants to help you understand your credit score, what it means, and how it can affect things like buying a new car or renting an apartment.
Landlords and lenders are likely to look at your credit score. You can monitor your VantageScore through PrivacyGuard. Your VantageScore is determined by the three major credit bureaus. The higher the score, the more likely you are to secure a loan with a good interest rate or get approved for an apartment.
While you can monitor your credit and identity with other services, one of the benefits of having PrivacyGuard is the way it alerts you. There’s an app where you can check your credit and ID reports whenever you want. Also, PrivacyGuard will send you text and email alerts as well as a monthly credit report.
This helps you catch concerning actions quickly and minimize identity theft losses. Additional alerts include:
PrivacyGuard was fast to sign up for and get going. After you provide your payment info, you’ll enter your personal information and then you’re ready to go. You can check your credit scores, get recommendations on how to increase your credit scores, and navigate various dashboards like the Identity Alert menu above. There’s also a link to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store to download the mobile apps for iOS and Android devices.
If you want to take advantage of the full power of the product, you’ll have to enter information into multiple monitoring areas. Thankfully, the dashboard is intelligent and lets you know what information you’ve input and which sections you still need to fill out. There are red dots indicating information PrivacyGuard is monitoring and yellow caution signs where you still need to input your info.
Navigation to each section was easy. You’re quickly able to view the monitoring information for each section, like our birthday below. Since we didn’t enter our driver’s license or passport number, that was still blank.
One feature that didn’t work for us was the Registered Offenders locator. We disabled our ad and cookie blockers, cleared our cache, and made sure cookies were enabled, but it still wouldn’t load. We aren’t quite sure why, but we couldn’t make it work.
Also, we don’t love a product that makes us enable cookies and disable ad blockers to use it. Since the other services work without this hassle, we aren’t sure why cookies needed to be enabled for the Registered Offenders locator to work. We already know PrivacyGuard is collecting and selling our data, so requiring us to disable blockers is especially annoying.
Overall, we can see why someone would want to use PrivacyGuard. It has a clean dashboard, it’s easy to use, and it provides a lot of information. When we went to cancel our trial, we were able to do that from our account page and without much incident. If you’re concerned about your credit and identity safety, this may be a great service for you.
If you decide to sign up for a service like PrivacyGuard, you’re going to be handing over the most sensitive aspects of your personal data in order to use all the offered features and services. It’s imperative that any service collecting this will handle it responsibly.
Unfortunately, we’re not comfortable with how PrivacyGuard handles our data. The privacy policy is lengthy and covers each individual category in PrivacyGuard’s offerings, but what we found over and over again was language that shows data is shared by PrivacyGuard.
In very plain writing, PrivacyGuard lets you know that data collection is automatic, which means you don’t have the option to opt out. And your information is shared with third parties for the purposes of marketing.
While this isn’t the only purpose of data collection, it shouldn’t be in the policy for a company claiming to guard your privacy. PrivacyGuard charges enough for its services that it shouldn’t be selling your data. It’s time companies like this do better.
The policy notes that PrivacyGuard collects the following information:
And while PrivacyGuard uses your personal data for some legitimate reasons, such as improving its website and online services, it also uses your data for some concerning purposes:
Additionally, PrivacyGuard notes it shares your personal information with third parties, including:
According to the website, you receive the PrivacyGuard app with any of the plans. The website shows the app is available in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. The app has a 4.8-star rating in the Apple store and a 4.8-star rating in the Google Play store.
At least the hefty price tag of PrivacyGuard comes with comprehensive customer support. While the Contact Us page is tucked quietly into the footer of the website, there are several methods of contact once you get there. We appreciated that you can call, email, or even send them a letter.
If you click on the FAQ page, however, you’ll find limited information. While this isn’t as expansive of a self-help section as we see with other security products, it does tend to lend itself to calling the customer service phone number if you really need assistance. We like that focus on personal assistance rather than leaving us to fend for ourselves in forums or identity theft prevention guides.
There are three plans offered by PrivacyGuard ranging from about $10 a month to about $25 a month. You can test out any plan for $1 for the first 14 days — after that, you’ll be charged the full price of the plan.
Total Protection, the most expensive plan, is a combination of the other two plans and offers the most coverage. In addition to all the features offered in the Identity and Credit Protection plans, it also includes additional features like emergency travel assistance and medical record reimbursement.
If the nearly $25-a-month price tag has you doing a double take, there is the more affordable Identity Protection plan for just under $10 a month. While you won’t get the credit monitoring services offered through the credit plan, you will still have monitoring on your Social Security number and financial accounts. Also, the Identity Protection plan offers $1 million in identity theft insurance, which the Credit Protection plan doesn’t offer.
While the Identity Protection plan offers a decent amount of features for the price, the Credit and Total Protection plans are more expensive than necessary. Credit monitoring can be done for free through other services like Credit Karma and WalletHub.
You can get a free credit report from Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion through AnnualCreditReport.com. Currently, the service allows you to request a new report each week.
| Plan | PrivacyGuard Identity Protection | PrivacyGuard Credit Protection | PrivacyGuard Total Protection |
| Price per month | $9.99/mo | $19.99/mo | $24.99/mo |
| Who’s covered | 1 adult | 1 adult | 1 adult, 10 children |
| Identity theft insurance | Up to $1 million | Up to $1 million | |
| Identity recovery | |||
| Credit monitoring | |||
| Financial activity alerts | |||
| Credit reports | Yes — Experian, TransUnion, Equifax | Yes — Experian, TransUnion, Equifax | |
| Credit score | |||
| VantageScore | |||
| Credit lock and freeze | |||
| Dark web alerts | |||
| Social Security Number monitoring | |||
| USPS address change alerts | |||
| Social media account alerts | |||
| Home title monitoring | |||
| Details | View Plan | View Plan | View Plan |
For you to get the most out of your PrivacyGuard subscription, you’ll need the Total Protection plan for about $25 a month. This is fairly expensive considering there are free products like Credit Karma and TrueIdentity out there that provide you with the essential protection features you need.
PrivacyGuard is a service of Trilegiant Corporation headquartered in Stamford, CT. Trilegiant describes itself as, “the premier membership-based provider of travel, shopping, entertainment, and consumer protection services.”[1]
PrivacyGuard provides its customers with their VantageScore, which is an average of credit scores from the three reporting bureaus Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax.
Current prices for PrivacyGuard are as follows:
You can try any plan for $1 for the first 14 days, after which you’ll be charged the full price of the plan.
Robust Total Protection plan
Additional alerts and reports, like a registered offender list
Sells data to third parties
PrivacyGuard is good at what it does. The dashboard is user-friendly, all of your information is presented on the screen, and you can continue to add more information to make sure no aspect of your credit or identity is compromised or used anywhere else in the world. It definitely gives you peace of mind.
The two biggest caveats we have are with the price and the data sale. If $25 a month is in your budget, then you may find a lot of use with PrivacyGuard. We don’t believe the Credit or Identity Protection plans are worth their costs on their own, but Total Protection is comprehensive and likely more worth the high price tag.
Selling your data, on the other hand, is something that makes PrivacyGuard a no-go for us. We aren’t fans of privacy and security services and software that bill themselves as a way to keep you safe and then turn around and sell your data for marketing purposes. We stay away from products like that, but we recognize that may not be a concern for you. If it isn’t, PrivacyGuard is an easy way to monitor all of your sensitive information.
Robust Total Protection plan
Additional alerts and reports, like a registered offender list
Sells data to third parties
