Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection: A Comprehensive Review
When you use the internet, you inevitably share some personal information. Advertisers track your interests, making it feel impossible to maintain online privacy. Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection helps you regain control by scanning both legal and illegal data sources to manage your digital footprint.
This service helps users find a balance between sharing necessary information and protecting personal data from being exposed. While many products identify data breaches, Bitdefender provides the tools to proactively defend your privacy.
Pros:
- Finds your private information online
- Helps you contact companies to view or delete private data
- Manages data breaches
- Detects social media impersonators
- Offers remedial actions and educational articles
Cons:
- Working through action items can be awkward
- Expensive
Table of Contents
- How Much Is Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection?
- Getting Started With Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection
- Digital Dashboard
- Additional Data Monitoring
- Taking Charge of Your Digital Footprint
- Dealing With Data Breaches
- Defeating Social Media Impersonators
- Verdict: Expensive, But Effective
How Much Is Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection?
Bitdefender’s approach focuses on protecting your online accounts, data, and reputation.
- LifeLock: Costs between $124.99 and $339.99 annually.
- Optery: Ranges from free to $249 per year for the automated Ultimate tier.
- Privacy Bee: Costs $197 per year.
A yearly subscription for Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection costs $79.99, but is currently discounted to $39.99 for the first year. Although it is less expensive, it does not provide automated personal data removal or active protection against identity theft.
Bitdefender’s features are not unique. Password managers like LastPass and Keeper report on breached passwords. Many antivirus utilities report data breaches. However, Bitdefender provides detailed and informative findings, offers active help, and explanatory articles to understand its findings.
Getting Started With Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection
This service is accessed via the Bitdefender Central website, and there is no local application. You will need to log in to your Central account or create an account. Then you use the My Subscriptions tab to enter your activation code.
You will need to provide your full name, email address, and phone number. Verification of the email and phone is done by sending a code, so be sure to have access.
Once these details are entered, Bitdefender searches both the legal and dark web. The scan should take about a minute. Then, reports are returned of all of the personal information found using the minimal details you supplied.
Digital Dashboard
The Digital Identity Monitor Dashboard gives an overview of the service’s findings. Fortunately, the dashboard has four main sections: Digital Identity Protection Score, Digital Footprint, Data Breaches, and Impersonation Check.
Along the top of the dashboard area, you find clickable headings that open seven tabs with more detail: Dashboard, Digital Footprint, Dark Web Monitoring, Impersonation Check, Data Brokers, News, and Event History.
Digital Identity Protection Score
The dashboard provides an overall score from 0 to 100 to give an overview of how you’re doing. Next to it is a risk map to show why your score is where it is. Both include links to Learn more to explain the risk map.
In this test, the score was surprisingly low, at 2 out of 100. The risk map was used to provide details as to why the score had been set low. Items on the left have the least impact, while items on the right have the most. An example of a low-impact item would be exposure of your IP address, while having your username and password exposed would have the maximal impact. The vertical position represents the frequency of this exposure type among users, with the most frequent types at the top.
Clicking a marker yielded details. For example, one marker showed email and password exposed, with an impact of 10.
At this point, it is natural to want to link directly to the problem. Unfortunately, the dashboard’s score area doesn’t let you do that. The closest it comes is a list of actions to improve the score. The list suggested dealing with three specific data breaches, each offering “+ 0 Protection Score points.” Completing those three actions got a congratulatory message, but the score did not rise. This prompted a move to the next dashboard section.
Digital Footprint
The next panel reports on your digital footprint, which Bitdefender describes as “all the personal information that can be found about your persona online.” The dashboard initially reported, “No exposed personal data found so far,” but the separate Digital Footprint tab revealed 57 services holding personal data. The clean bill of health in the dashboard referred to the fact that the user’s personal data was already purged from data brokers during reviews of similar products.
I found the summary of 41 exposed personal data items on 46 websites. A comparison panel revealed that the sample account had significantly more data exposed than the average user and that all data findings had been reviewed for accuracy.
A line chart shows your digital footprint’s evolution over time. Panels provide links explaining the data importance and links to suggested actions. There is an emphasis on helping users understand how digital exposure affects them and what to do about it.
Data Breaches
This panel relates to personal information’s appearance in data breaches, including the total number of exposures.
A separate panel charts your personal data breach history over the last 10 years. The most important part however is taking what actions you can to deal with these breaches.
Impersonation Check
Bitdefender scans almost 30 social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and even Friendster and searches for similar profiles to determine if you have any impersonators.
It’s important to check these profiles and claim the ones that are yours. This identifies any impersonators. The dashboard lists prominent matching profiles and provides a button to see everything found. You can note an item as yours, an impersonator, or something else.
Additional Data Monitoring
To get started, you supply your name, email, phone, and address. During analysis, Bitdefender picks up other components of your identity and uses them to extend its reach. However, you can help the process by providing more information directly.
Click Data Monitoring to add more email addresses and phone numbers. You can add up to ten email addresses and five phone numbers and must verify by reporting a code.
There’s also an option to allow Bitdefender to search your email inbox for connections with services that may hold your personal identity data. When you connect your Gmail or Outlook account, Bitdefender gets full access, just like McAfee+. As with McAfee+, you may want to revoke full access after the analysis.
Taking Charge of Your Digital Footprint
Simply having a digital footprint isn’t inherently negative. You need to provide information to the services you connect with. The problem is that your footprint spreads, which impacts your privacy. To review and reduce its spread, click the Digital Footprint tab.
This tab holds a collection of panels representing companies and services that may hold your personal data. Clicking the Manage your data link brings up a page with information and action items. The page provides a small panel describing the company or service and explains why Bitdefender thinks you’re connected. You can recognize if it is an ongoing relationship, and Bitdefender can help you send a personal data request to the company to get your data removed.
You can also find accounts that you no longer use. Bitdefender can provide links to help change passwords, set up multi-factor authentication, or delete the account. You can also send an official account deletion email and track the 30-day compliance period.
Dealing With Data Breaches
Bitdefender uses your personal information to search for your data on the web. When your data is in a data breach, it is more serious. Bitdefender lists breaches that include your data and offers advice. This list is on the Dark Web Monitoring tab.
Bitdefender lists all breaches and provides action buttons for each. The pages give impressive information about what happened, which distinguishes Bitdefender from other providers. You can see what types of personal information were exposed.
The Take Action buttons allows for advice that contains the following actions, to change the password, enable multi-factor authentication, delete the account, or report you never had the account. These actions can be marked as done or indicate an action you can’t take.
Defeating Social Media Impersonators
Bitdefender scans social media sites looking for profiles that might be yours. It is important to claim those that are really you. Then impersonators will stand out. Bitdefender easily found the author’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. For linked in, the system may ask you to do a couple of tasks to prove that you are human.
Verdict: Expensive, But Effective
Bitdefender Digital Identity Protection scans the web to report where it found your personal data. It helps deal with the aftermath of data breaches, asks services to remove data, and cancels outdated accounts. If someone is impersonating you on social media, the service will alert you. The service doesn’t aim to detect and mitigate identity theft, nor does it actively remove your data from aggregator sites. The service is worthwhile if your resources allow. And if you opt for the maxed-out Bitdefender Ultimate Security suite, Digital Identity Protection is included.
There are many ways to protect your online privacy. Choosing the best is tough, because the aims are different.
