PrivacyGuard Review 2024: Who is it best for?

PrivacyGuard is an online service that monitors your credit and provides identity theft protection. It tops out at $24.99/mo, which gives you the most protection and coverage. 

PrivacyGuard does what it says and gives you a comprehensive overview of your credit and identity footprints. The big question is, is it worth it?

PrivacyGuard pros and cons

Review at a glance

4.7

AllAboutCookies writers and editors score products based on a number of objective features as well as our expert editorial assessment. Our partners do not influence how we rate products.

Editorial Rating

Learn More

On PrivacyGuard's website

Identity Protection

PrivacyGuard

• Robust Total Protection plan
• Additional alerts and reports, like a registered offender list
• Sells data to third parties

Our experience

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.

Who is it best for?

• For any individual or single parent looking for identity theft protection without needing to cover multiple adults.

PrivacyGuard's best plan is also its most expensive, which means that the monthly cost could quickly add up for families with multiple adults. PrivacyGuard will monitor children's social security numbers for free with your subscription. This makes it ideal for individuals or single parents.

What does it protect against?

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:

• Credit score tracking and monitoring
• Public and dark web scanning
• Social Security number monitoring for you and up to 10 children
• Driver’s license and passport monitoring
• Bank account monitoring
• ID, application, and public records monitoring
• Secure browser for safe internet browsing
• Secure keyboard to help avoid keylogging hackers
• Fraud assistance
• Lost and stolen wallet protection
• Neighborhood reports
• Registered offenders list
• Medical record reimbursement

Prices and subscriptions

There are three plans offered by PrivacyGuard ranging from $9.99–$24.99/mo. 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, 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 Total Protection price tag has you doing a double take, there's the more affordable Identity Protection plan for just $9.99/mo. While you won’t get the credit monitoring services offered through the credit plan, you will still have monitoring for 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.

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 month.

PrivacyGuard plans comparison

Features

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.

Credit monitoring

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:

• New inquiries
• Derogatory information like a past-due bill
• New accounts opened
• Public records added to your credit file
• Change of address

Credit reports and credit scores

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.

Alerts

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:

• Registered offenders list
• Neighborhood reports
• Annual public records reports
• Online fraud alerts
• Credit reports
• Monthly status updates regarding your credit and identity

Does it keep your data safe?

In very plain writing, PrivacyGuard lets you know that data collection is automatic, which means you don’t have the option to opt-out. You can send an email to service@tenerity.com with a request to stop the marketing communications, but we wish you could actually opt out of the data collection.

The policy notes that PrivacyGuard collects the following information:

• Log Data: Including internet protocol (IP) address, operating system, browser type, browser ID, the URL entered and the referring page/campaign, date/time of visit, the time spent on our services and any errors that may occur during the visit to our services.
• Analytics Data: Including the electronic path taken to our services, through our services and when exiting our services, as well as usage and activity on our services, such as the links, objects, products and benefits viewed, clicked or otherwise interacted with (also known as ‘Clickstream Data’).
• Location Data: Including general geographic location based on the Log Data we collect or more precise location when permitted by law.
• Application Data: Some of our services offer mobile or browser applications to allow individuals to take advantage of our service offerings on the go and/or when visiting third-party websites and other online services. Certain of these applications also allow us to access more precise Location Data and collect information about use of and interactions with third-party websites and online services (including the products or services an individual is interested in or purchases) to better serve our users.”

Compatibility

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 for iOS and a 4.7-star rating for Android.

Customer support

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.

Alternatives

PrivcyGuard might not be your thing. Whether you want family protection or features that PrivacyGuard lacks, you have other options for credit monitoring and identity theft protection. Below are some of our favorites. 

Service
Price	Starts at $9.00/mo (billed annually)	Starts at $7.50/mo (billed annually) for first year	Starts at $7.20/mo
# of people covered	1 - 5 adults, unlimited children	1 - 2 adults, up 5 children	1 - 5 adults, unlimited children
Types of identity monitoring	Identity and SSN, account breach, home and auto title, criminal and court records	Identity and SSN, dark web, phone takeover, home title, social media	Dark web, high-risk, bank account, social media, credit and debit card
ID theft insurance	Up to $1 million	Up to $1.05 million through $3 million, depending on plan	Up to $1 million
Credit monitoring
Identity restoration services
Details	Get Aura	Get LifeLock	Get Identity Guard

PrivacyGuard FAQs

Bottom line: Is PrivacyGuard good?

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. 

PrivacyGuard is one of many identity theft protection services that offer both preventative and remediation services. Most people don't think about this type of service as being necessary, but if you've ever lost your wallet or had your bank account hacked, you know how frustrating and time consuming it can be to fix it.

Protecting your identity shouldn't be complicated. Identity theft services are a secure way to give you peace of mind. Make sure you're protected before it's too late.

4.7

AllAboutCookies writers and editors score products based on a number of objective features as well as our expert editorial assessment. Our partners do not influence how we rate products.

Editorial Rating

Learn More

On PrivacyGuard's website

Identity Protection

PrivacyGuard

• Robust Total Protection plan
• Additional alerts and reports, like a registered offender list
• Sells data to third parties

Author Details

Mary James

About the Author

Mary is a seasoned cybersecurity writer with over seven years of experience. With a B.S. in Liberal Arts from Clarion University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Point Park University, she educates audiences on scams, antivirus software, and more. Her passion lies in educating audiences on helpful ways to protect their data.