PCMag has been writing about identity theft for almost 20 years, and LifeLock has been offering identity theft defense for nearly that long. Match LifeLock’s identity theft protection with Norton’s equally mature device-level security, and you get Norton 360 With LifeLock, a winning combination. The security suite alone is an Editors’ Choice winner, with full-scale licenses for Norton’s VPN and plentiful online storage for your backups. With LifeLock added it also earns our Editors’ Choice award for device security with identity protection.
How Much Does Norton With LifeLock Cost?
At the basic Select tier, a Norton 360 With LifeLock subscription costs $149.99 per year, just $30 more than Norton 360 Deluxe. You get the same five suite licenses and five VPN licenses, though the amount of hosted online storage for backups doubles to 100GB. You can also pay $179.99 per year for a subscription that bumps protection to 10 device security licenses, 10 VPN licenses, and 250GB of storage for backups.
Yes, that’s on the high side for a security suite. Bitdefender Total Security gives you 10 licenses for $99.99 per year, as do the top-tier suites from Total Defense and Vipre. But when you compare it with other products that combine device security with identity theft protection, Norton’s prices aren’t out of line. For example, Bitdefender Ultimate Security costs $179.99, which gets you coverage for 10 devices, VPN access with no bandwidth limits, and one identity. Bitdefender Ultimate Security’s top-tier edition goes for $239.99 per year and offers significant enhancements in identity theft features and payouts.
It's Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure OnlineIDShield and IDX Complete each have just two pricing tiers. With IDShield, $179.40 per year lets you protect three devices and one identity. Upping that to $359.40 per year lets you install protection on 15 devices. It also extends identity protection to your whole family, meaning you, your partner, and any number of minor children. As for IDX Complete, it starts at $355.32 per year for three devices and one identity. This service’s top tier costs $701.88 per year and gives you protection for six devices and identity monitoring for your family—defined in this case as you, your partner, and up to five minor children.
Aura is an interesting service, one owned by the same company that publishes the widely used Hotspot Shield VPN. In testing, Aura’s device-level security hasn’t exhibited the best protective qualities in our testing, but it certainly offers quantity—10, 20, or 50 device licenses for $144, $264, or $444 per year. Those three levels also give you identity protection for one, two, or five individuals.
McAfee+ includes identity theft protection that’s roughly parallel to LifeLock—but not at its $139.99 Premium tier. If you want identity monitoring, you must spring for the Advanced or Ultimate tiers at $199.99 and $299.99 per year, respectively. Norton’s corresponding higher tiers—Advantage and Ultimate Plus—go for $249.99 and $349.99, respectively. I’ll go into their details below. Note that with McAfee+, there’s no limit on how many Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, or ChromeOS devices you can protect.
Even if getting LifeLock identity defense is your primary aim, you should consider opting for LifeLock combined with Norton’s device protection. At the Select tier, the combination costs $25 more than LifeLock alone; at the higher tiers, adding Norton adds just $10 to your yearly subscription.
Can I Protect My Family With LifeLock?
The Norton prices I’ve mentioned are for one individual’s protection. To protect yourself and your partner, you’ll need a Family plan. Don’t expect a volume discount, though. Family plan prices simply add the price of another LifeLock subscription at whatever tier you’ve chosen. You can also add limited identity protection for up to five children by opting for a Family & Kids plan, which adds from $110 to $130 to the price of a Family plan. Pricing tops out at Norton 360 With LifeLock Ultimate Plus for Family & Kids, a subscription that costs $819.99 per year.
Device Protection by the Numbers
As noted, there are three protection tiers for Norton 360 With LifeLock: Select, Advanced, and Advanced Plus. Higher tiers come with increased identity protection features, as I discuss below. But the tier you choose also defines what you get in the realm of device protection.
At the Select tier, the least expensive, your device protection parallels that of Norton 360 Deluxe. You get five security suite licenses and five licenses to use Norton’s VPN, with no limits on VPN bandwidth or server choices. You can use those licenses to protect devices running Windows, macOS, Android, or iOS. The basic Norton 360 subscription gets 50GB of online storage for backups, while the edition with LifeLock ups that to 100GB. For $30 more, you can bump your licenses to 10 and your backup storage to 250GB while retaining the starting tier of LifeLock protection.
At the device-protection level, there’s no significant difference between the Advanced tier and the 10-license Select subscription. You still get 10 suite licenses, 10 device licenses, and 250GB for backup storage. The difference comes totally on the LifeLock side, with added and enhanced features along with larger payouts during remediation.
When you go all in for an Ultimate Plus solution, you naturally get every available identity protection feature, and you maximize remediation payouts. At this tier, there’s no limit on the number of devices you can protect with Norton’s security suite and VPN. And the storage space for online backup rises to 500GB.
Your Reading Assignment
The cross-platform security protection you get with this product is Norton 360 Deluxe, with a few very small differences. The LifeLock-equipped edition tracks more items in its dark web monitoring and gives you more hosted online storage for your backups. Other than that, the security apps that you install on your Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS devices are unchanged.
One minor difference from the no-LifeLock installation comes in the My Norton dashboard. Instead of Dark Web Monitoring, the dashboard shows LifeLock ID Theft Protection.
(Credit: Norton)That being the case, I won't recap or summarize my review of the security suite without LifeLock. Please read that article for a complete understanding of the device security components of Norton 360 With LifeLock and what it brings to the various platforms. Then, come back here to learn what you gain by adding LifeLock.
Using Norton 360 With LifeLock
Buying a Norton 360 With LifeLock subscription is a little more complicated than buying the basic Norton 360 suite. You must submit your credit card details for payment, but the app also asks for your address, Social Security Number, date of birth, and mobile phone number. Get used to giving Norton personal details, as it needs them to protect you. There's an invitation to extend LifeLock protection to your spouse, children, or other adults (at an extra cost, of course).
(Credit: Norton)With registration complete, you can log in to the LifeLock online dashboard. A menu on the left offers eight options: Dashboard, Alerts, Credit Services, Lock & Freeze, Transactions, Restoration, Monitored Info, and Plan Details. You may see advice panels across the top suggesting such tasks as setting up Identity Lock or linking your social media accounts.
Scroll down the rest of the dashboard to find a collection of informational panels. The Alerts panel shows unread alerts and contains a link to the complete alert list. The Credit Services panel displays your Equifax credit score with a link for more details. The Identity Lock panel shows whether you’ve engaged the TransUnion Credit Lock, the Payday Loan Lock, or both. Once you’ve configured Transaction Monitoring, Social Media Monitoring, and Privacy Monitor, you’ll see a summary of those features here. Next is a panel that links to your Plan Details and, at the bottom, a visual representation of what information LifeLock is monitoring.
(Credit: Norton)Early Warning System
Identity thieves do their best to keep you in the dark about their activities. The more time they have to meddle with your accounts, the more damage they can do. You may be clueless about the incident until you get a bill for an account you never signed up for or get charged with a crime someone else committed. Norton offers a wide variety of early-warning monitors and tools so you can head off identity thieves before they do too much harm.
Identity Monitoring at All Tiers
The basic Norton 360, without LifeLock, monitors the Dark Web for exposed personal information. It also notifies you when your data is revealed in a known breach. Adding LifeLock, even at the basic Select tier, expands the possibilities for such protection. You can track:
5 addresses
10 bank accounts
1 birthdate
10 credit cards
1 driver’s license
5 emails
10 gamer tags
5 insurance policies
Mother’s maiden name
5 phone numbers
1 SSN
Don’t delay; fill in all your personal information right away. Norton can’t find your data being traded on the dark web if it doesn’t know what to look for.
(Credit: Norton)If identity thieves are trading your personal details, your credit score may take a hit. LifeLock monitors your credit score with Experian and lets you know of any suspicious changes.
An attempt by someone else to open credit in your name is a huge problem. LifeLock watches for such attempts, noting any that use your social security number, address, or date of birth. It also warns you if it detects a change of address with financial institutions or the USPS. And it does its best to detect misuse of your personal information in various other areas, including public records and unemployment records.
(Credit: Norton)Advanced Identity Monitoring
There’s identity theft in general, and then there’s the actual hard-cash theft that happens when the bad guys gain entry to your financial accounts. At the Advanced level, LifeLock (through partner Yodlee) monitors your credit, checking, and savings accounts for large purchases and abnormal transactions.
To set up monitoring, you provide the username and login for each of your banks, credit cards, and other financial accounts. You can review all transactions from within the service.
(Credit: Norton)LifeLock also looks for sneakier tricks like recurring charges that suddenly increase. Aura, Bitdefender, and IDShield also track anomalous transactions, though Bitdefender reserves that feature for its highest tier.
By signing you up for a Buy Now Pay Later plan, identity thieves can make off with merchandise and be long gone before you even know anything happened. LifeLock also tracks these plans, so you can head off the charge before it comes due.
At the Advanced level, you get more than just credit score tracking. LifeLock presents you with your entire credit report from Equifax every month. It’s a lot to read, but if you’ve gotten other alerts or warnings, you’ll want to peruse it in detail.
Sometimes, identity thieves don’t go straight for the money. They start small, working toward a complete takeover of your identity. LifeLock monitors your social media accounts for any evidence of a compromise. Bitdefender, IDShield, and IDX Complete all have their own takes on social media privacy. With LifeLock, you can connect your Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Snapchat accounts.
(Credit: Norton)How often does your phone play a part in verifying your identity? Hackers may use SIM swap attacks and similar techniques to take control of your phone; LifeLock watches to make sure they fail. IDShield and McAfee offer similar protection against phone takeover. Fictitious Identity Monitoring alerts you if your SSN is misused.
If you have a common name, you might be caught up in an investigation of a crime committed by a namesake. But even if your name is one in a million, a perp could offer up that name to the police, perhaps with a fake ID. LifeLock monitors crime reports to ensure you’re not surprised by a spurious arrest.
Identity Extras at the Ultimate Plus Level
Going for LifeLock’s top-tier protection gets you some new types of monitoring, plus enhancements to those at the previous level. For example, in addition to looking for crimes committed in your name, it also monitors sex offender registries. You really don’t want to suffer for someone else’s perverse crimes.
At its basic level, social media monitoring looks for evidence of account takeover. For top-tier users, it alerts on evidence of cyberbullying, and its tracking extends to TikTok.
Transaction monitoring expands beyond credit, checking, and savings accounts. At this tier, it looks for suspicious transactions in 401k and other investment accounts. It also watches for new checking and savings accounts opened using your personal information.
You may have seen some scary TV ads about how someone could sneakily transfer the title of your home to their name and thereby gain ownership. LifeLock’s Home Title Monitoring warns of several variations of that dastardly attack.
(Credit: Norton)As for keeping track of your credit score and reports, Ultimate Plus users get ultimate access. LifeLock provides a daily score from Equifax with regular reports. And once a year, it grabs your report from all three bureaus. You could get those reports yourself for free, but LifeLock automates the process.
Privacy Monitor Offers Data Broker Opt-Out
Much of Norton’s monitoring is devoted to the illegal use of your personal information, but not all use of your info is illegal. Data brokers hoover up data from publicly available sources on the internet and aggregate their findings into personal profiles, which they then sell to advertisers and less savory entities. Doing so is legal, but to stay legal, they must comply with requests to have your data removed. Of course, before you can make that opt-out request, you must know which brokers have your data. That’s where Norton’s Privacy Monitor comes in.
Privacy Monitor scans several dozen data broker sites and reports that have gathered your personal information. As for sending the opt-out request, that’s something you must take care of yourself. LifeLock won’t handle removals automatically unless you spring for the Privacy Monitor Assistant, a separate subscription at $129.99 per year. Yes, that’s nearly as much as the base price of Norton 360 With LifeLock.
It’s also worth noting that you don’t need Norton 360 or LifeLock to get that initial scan. You can do it online from the Privacy Monitor Assistant web page.
(Credit: Norton)As far as I can tell, this feature is significantly less effective than dedicated data-broker opt-out services like Privacy Bee and Optery. Both offer a free scan, like Norton’s; I ran those scans for a quick sanity check. Privacy Bee quickly examined hundreds of sites and found my information on 46 of them. Optery’s free level, which doesn’t look at every site managed for paid subscribers, found 21. As for LifeLock, it found just one.
Optery’s basic paid tier automates removal from more than 110 sites and costs about a third of the price of Norton Privacy Monitor Assistant. Privacy Bee costs more, $197 per year, but it provides automated opt-out for more than 430 sites at that level. And as noted, both are more effective than LifeLock at the free level. I don’t see this feature adding a lot.
Put Your Data in the Deep Freeze
Reacting to a warning about theft or misuse of your personal data is like locking the barn door after your horse is stolen. Wouldn’t it be better to put a stronger lock on that door? Norton offers several ways to lock up your finances and personal data so nobody can get at them without authorization, and most of these features are accessible to users at all protection tiers.
The Freeze Center offers instructions and access to initiating a credit freeze with all three big credit bureaus. You must follow the instructions and do the job yourself, but LifeLock offers clear instructions. Those subscribing at the Advanced level or higher can also invoke TransUnion’s Identity Lock system. With Identity Lock, nobody can open a new account or Payday loan. If you need to open such an account yourself, you just turn off the lock.
(Credit: Norton)In addition to credit bureau freezes, LifeLock helps you freeze bank account creation by going through a service called ChexSystems and freeze the opening of bogus utility accounts by registering with the National Consumer Telecom & Utilities Exchange (NCTUE). This page also links to an IRS page where you can set up an Identity Protection PIN to prevent frauds from filing taxes in your name (and claiming your refund).
All subscribers can access the new Employment Data Freeze and Work Number Freeze. The former freezes the use of your SSN to verify employment, while the latter performs a similar freeze on Equifax’s Work Number verification system.
Help Recovering From Identity Theft
Even with all the warnings, and even with freezing as much of your data as you can, there’s always the chance that a clever hacker or thief could gain control of your identity. If LifeLock warns of a possible problem, or if you notice something out of the ordinary, Identity Restoration Specialists are available to help you track down just what happened and claw your personal life back from the identity thieves. I’ve seen references to 24/7 remediation in Norton’s materials, but in fact, the experts are available during business hours.
At its simplest, this service walks you through recovery from a stolen wallet. That includes getting replacements for credit cards, insurance cards, driver's licenses, and more. Yes, you could grind through this process on your own, but having an expert at hand surely eases the pain.
If your identity and reputation have been damaged, Norton will pay for recovery and remediation. That includes reimbursement for stolen funds and payments to lawyers and other experts, among other things. According to my Norton contacts, the company pays out the needed funds and then recovers money from its own insurance partner, meaning you deal only with Norton. They also stated that there are no shared limits, sub-limits, or caps on expert and lawyer feeds. Such limits are standard for most similar services.
At all levels, Norton subscribers get the remediation services described above. The difference lies in just how much is covered. Select, Advantage, and Ultimate Plus subscribers all get up to $1 million for lawyers and experts. Select users can receive up to $25,000 for stolen funds reimbursement and another $25,000 for personal expense compensation. Those figures both rise to $100,000 at the Advanced level and $1 million for Ultimate Plus. If you’re unsure exactly what you’re entitled to, just click Plan Details and scroll down to see the particulars for each plan component.
(Credit: Norton)The two upper tiers of McAfee+, Advanced and Ultimate, include a million-dollar guarantee. Like Norton, McAfee aims to prevent identity theft, but if the worst happens, you get the same kind of treatment, including your own case worker and a variety of reimbursement possibilities. However, there are separate limits on things like how much you can be reimbursed for lost wages, childcare, and such. Most competitors match that million-dollar guarantee; some double it. Most have limitations that LifeLock does not have.
One more thing. You’ll want to scroll to the very bottom of the Monitored Information page and set a Verbal Passcode to be used when you contact LifeLock on the phone. That passcode makes sense; the last thing you want to do is review your most private details with a fake LifeLock agent.
Keep Your Children’s Identities Safe With LifeLock
As noted earlier, if you’ve opted for a family subscription (covering you and an adult partner), you can extend protection to your children (up to five) for between $110 and $130 extra per year, depending on your subscription tier. Granted, your kids likely don’t have bulging bank accounts ripe for robbery, but scammers can use identity elements like their SSNs. The consequences may not show up for years, yielding a nasty surprise when your child applies for a credit card or a job.
The protection LifeLock offers for a child is naturally quite limited compared to its full-on adult protection. Perhaps the most important is the ability to freeze your child’s credit, preventing the opening of accounts using their personal information. LifeLock also keeps track of any credit reports associated with your child’s information. The mere existence of a credit report in a child’s name can be a sign of identity theft.
Finally, with your child’s cooperation, LifeLock can monitor social media for cyberbullying and other problems. It notifies you, the parent, on detecting posts that may be “sexually explicit, drug-related, violent or hate speech.”
Protection for Mobile Devices
Norton 360 Deluxe protects devices running Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. The Android app gets top scores from testing labs and offers a wide range of security features, though it now leaves antitheft protection to Android’s built-in features. On iOS, as is typical, security features are limited. You also get a limited LifeLock app, though all it does is relay notifications and manage your protected personal data.
When you select a Norton subscription that includes LifeLock, you get the full-powered LifeLock Mobile App for iOS and Android. It looks like the LifeLock online dashboard, just arranged for a mobile display. A banner at the top reports any unread alerts and gives you links to details. Four panels arranged below cover Credit Monitoring, Identity Lock, Financial Transactions, and Personal Information. Naturally, tapping any panel drills in for corresponding details.
(Credit: Norton)Below those four panels are banners for Social Media Monitoring, ID Restoration, and Plan Details. You can use the apps to triage alerts from the service, see your credit report, check what information is being monitored, and quickly get access to support.
The Best Overall Identity Theft Protection
A subscription for Norton 360 With LifeLock gets you the same security protection that comes with Norton 360 Deluxe, an Editors' Choice winner for multi-device security that's distinguished by excellent test scores and a VPN with no annoying bandwidth limits. Adding LifeLock gives you early warning of any attack on your identity and helps you pick up the pieces afterward. It looks expensive, especially at the higher tiers, but its identity theft protection is comprehensive and time-tested, and its prices are in line with similar services. That makes Norton 360 With LifeLock our Editors' Choice suite for identity theft protection.
