Personally, I think I’m pretty tech savvy and do my best to pay close attention to what could be a scam. But I’m not the only person whose data I care about! My grandmother, parents, and even my sibling all have a lot of personal information online, and they need to protect it too. I can’t hover over their shoulder before they take every call or check every email, but there is plenty of software out there that can—which is why I enrolled in Aura’s Identity Guard Family Plan. I know our blogs aren’t normally personal testimonials, but in this case, I felt like it was necessary because this tool is extremely valuable, especially if you’re in my situation.
The family plan offered through Aura’s Identity Guard allows you to share Identity Guard’s protective features with up to 10 people! While it’s called the family plan you can share with anyone, including your roommates, which is exactly what I did.
My roommate complained constantly about the number of spam phone calls he was getting. It came out to be between 15-30 a week! He was convinced someone put his phone number on every shady form imaginable. I felt the same way, I take a lot of calls doing interviews and research for our site, so I often have to answer calls from unknown numbers and about 3/4ths of them felt like spam—but that all changed when I signed up for Identity Guard. I told him this and asked if he wanted to be a part of my family plan. He said yes and in the past month he’s received only 3 spam phone calls.
But obviously this is designed to mostly help family members! The person I’m most worried about is my grandmother. Even though she doesn’t voice it, I have noticed that she receives a lot of scams via email. We signed her up for Identity Guard and she mentioned that the emails have basically stopped altogether. On top of that, she started using Identity Guard’s anti-virus software, and told me that she feels safer online. I know this sounds like a commercial, but I cannot even begin to tell you how much relief this gave me! Obviously, this isn’t for everyone, but if you find yourself worried about something similar, I really recommend you check it out.
Now. Time to air my own dirty laundry. When I signed up for Identity Guard, I personally just expected to do a bit of poking around to write some articles and then keep it just to give me some peace of mind for my family and for the spam call filter. But…When I entered my email into the watchlist monitor, I was immediately hit with 17 alerts. I was nervous at first, but I found that the alerts were from data breaches dating all the way back to 2012. These breaches included my email address, my password, and other bits of information, like my old addresses. Luckily, I don’t use the same password for everything and have moved since then, but this explained how long this information sits in dark web data vaults and also that it is accessible to this day. I went back through those sites (at least the ones that were still running) and changed my passwords and enabled two factor authentication. Knowing how possible it is for another breach to happen (and that it is pretty much out of my hands if it does), I decided to do more than just maintain my account, in fact, I’m checking it weekly.
Ultimately, if this is something you worry about, I highly recommend you consider the plan, if not for you, then definitely for your family.