About LifeLock LifeLock is an organization that offers identity theft protection solutions. It is said to watch for any unusual activity on your credit reports, bank accounts, and the like, and to alert you to fraud if necessary by setting fraud alerts for you. Nonetheless, LifeLock has some adverse effects that consumers may not be aware of before patronizing the company’s services.
However, there is one significant drawback that has been identified in using LifeLock: the cost. LifeLock offers identity theft protection services that cost about $10 per month as a basic membership. This may not seem all that expensive at first glance, but if you calculate it out for a yearly price, it is well over a hundred dollars per year. Even for the bare minimum, identity protection will set you back $10 per month, and better protection services can be billed for $20 or even $30 monthly. That is over $200-$300 per year and it can be quite challenging for any family to set aside such an amount of money. While it is true that free credit and identity monitoring services also exist and are quite effective, the pricing set by LifeLock can be considered outrageous by some.
The second major issue with LifeLock is that it has to do with how well the services offered indeed protect their clients. LifeLock argues that by putting fraud alerts for you and your information and watching for suspicious activity, it prevents the majority of identity thefts. However, it is also an activity that you can perform on your own one way or the other for free by putting a fraud alert through the credit bureau of your choice among the three. Also, several previous studies have identified cases where large-scale identity theft incidents continued to take place in the members’ accounts while LifeLock was actively monitoring them. Nevertheless, there are some concerns associated with the potential invulnerability of its protective services to what its commercials depict. In essence, it implies that one has to part with his or her cash to have protection that is anyway not immune to failure as some of the research studies have indicated.
Similar to the critical facets pertinent to the business model of LifeLock – which is more of a lead-generating and alert-triggering service than a one-stop solution for identity theft – there are also some significant disadvantages when it comes to handling member accounts during incidents where identity theft still occurs. The primary claim of LifeLock, as an identity theft protection service, is that it will assist in promptly identifying identity theft and notifying the customer to take immediate measures to reduce the impact of steals. However, several victims of identity theft while under the protection of Lifelock for many years were fuming regarding the minimal help that they received directly from Lifelock when their accounts were being emptied or used by thieves. Instead of handling cases on behalf of the victims in many of the cases, LifeLock merely informs victims of certain activities taking place, and then it is up to the victims to do all the follow-up to frost the companies, contesting the fraudulent charges, filing an affidavit of fraud, etc Many of the victims have complained that they would like LifeLock to get more proactive and perform more of the work for them since they pay LifeLock a lot of money
The nature of the business that LifeLock provides has also raised some controversy over the years regarding the company itself. Todd Davis, the CEO and founder of the company, took a full-page ad in USA Today running his real Social Security number to prove that identity theft protection is all that LifeLock provides. Nevertheless, according to press reports, Todd Davis himself has experienced identity theft and has been able to forge documents more than a dozen times within 4 years and had reported fraudulent activities. This created a lot of doubt as to whether LifeLock served its purpose effectively and whether it was a legitimate company. It has also been subjected to scrutiny of the allegations of deceptive advertising by industry insiders as well as by government institutions. In 2010, LifeLock was forced to part with $12 million resulting from deceptive advertising, charges by FTC as well as 35 state attorney generals. That was the case for LifeLock for many years, with negative events such as these eroding its image in the eyes of many consumers.
However, there are hidden small prints of Lifelock’s services that outline some of the significant blind spots that are noticeable in the kinds of identity theft scenarios that Lifelock’s services are capable of offering support for. For example, if money is transferred from your banking services and/or your account numbers or credit card numbers are used fraudulently through your existing non-fraudulent accounts that are already open access, LifeLock may not deem this as identity theft, therefore, they may not be compelled to offer their services. In such cases, you will be expected to do all the necessary documentation and resolutions on your own – although these are identity theft cases where your details have been used in the wrong way. Thus, there is information that would be considered uncovered or excluded which has angered the subscribers when they expected to be more protected based on the general description.
A few LifeLock clients over the years have also complained about receiving numerous notifications of fraud, theft, and other identity thefts where they never occurred when the account was monitored with creditors and bureaus if they never occurred. Since there are so many circumstances that cause LifeLock to send alerts, it often results in card or account freezing from false alerts instead of actual theft attempts, which can be inconvenient for the member to have to unfreeze them. Some have experienced some problems that are a result of these unintended consequences that LifeLock’s overly aggressive monitoring systems fall for.
Finally, there is a more philosophical approach to criticize LifeLock service, namely it lies in the fact that to cover your back you need to pay constant premiums and it is all because information that is protected by the company should not be easily available to identity thieves. Why should the responsibility to be constantly on the lookout for possible identity thieves fall to each consumer most of the time when truly, foolproof personal data protection systems should be something that should be provided and expected, not to mention, a right? Even though companies such as LifeLock exist, some think they are just products of an increasingly vulnerable modern technological society that suffers from a systematic lack of strong identity verification and data protection laws. It might have been much more effective to put much more effort into enhancing those root weaknesses rather than merely applying an overlay through constant private services for consumers with products such as the ones LifeLock offers.
Therefore, let me summarize some weaknesses related to LifeLock and other similar identity theft monitoring services: Identifying elements such as the relatively low efficacy of the services for a high monetary cost, their inherently more post-factum and less encompassing support model in comparison to truly preventive one, past questions relating to the effectiveness of the company and its advertising, the fine print exceptions which show that the company may not cover as many types of scams and frauds Consumers have to analyze whether what is offered by LifeLock offers enough benefits over the drawbacks in contrast to simple free credit monitoring together with personal identity theft protective actions people can undertake individually. There are some significant grounds to believe that one should not wholly rely on LifeLock’s paid programs for ID protection based on the following negative aspects.
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