McAfee+ Premium Review: Identity Protection Beyond Plain Antivirus

Fix it now

McAfee+ Premium is published as covering unlimited devices and carries the full identity block: identity monitoring and alerts, personal info and online account scans, Social Privacy Manager, credit score, report and monitoring, identity restoration support, credit lock and security freeze, and up to $1M identity theft coverage. None of it makes your computer harder to compromise.

1. Buy it if you want the identity block running continuously and would otherwise pay for a monitoring service separately.
2. Buy it if you have a large number of devices. McAfee publishes this tier as unlimited, against McAfee Essential’s 5.
3. Skip it if you are moving up for better protection. The security core is the same as the tiers below it.
4. Skip it if you will not read the alerts. Monitoring you ignore is a subscription that does nothing at all.
5. Skip it if a password manager already warns you about breached credentials and you watch a breach notification service yourself.
6. Check the plan sheet for the country you are buying in. McAfee states identity theft coverage is not available to subscribers in the State of New York or Puerto Rico, and features vary by market.

McAfee+ Advanced differs from Premium in one published respect: Advanced files the personal data and online account removals for you, where Premium scans and shows you where you appear. If that is not worth money to you, Premium is the tier.

If the identity block is why you are here and the alerts will get read, this tier is coherent. Below is what each service can and cannot do, and where the free routes are.

Why it happens

Identity monitoring is the anchor. You register email addresses, phone numbers and other identifiers, and McAfee watches for them in leaked datasets and the places such data is traded. When something surfaces you get an alert telling you which exposure it came from, which is your cue to change a password or stop using an address. Alongside it, McAfee publishes credit score, report and monitoring, identity restoration support, credit lock and security freeze, and identity theft coverage of up to $1M – all of that in Premium, not held back for a higher tier.

Personal data cleanup addresses a different problem: the people-search and data broker sites that assemble profiles from public records and sell them. At this tier McAfee publishes personal info and online account scans, meaning the service finds where you appear and shows you. The tier above changes that word to removal. That single verb is the published difference between Premium and Advanced, and it is worth knowing before somebody sells you the higher plan on a story about credit monitoring you already have.

The security underneath does not change. Antivirus, the firewall, web and phishing protection through the browser extension, the password manager, Scam Detector and the VPN behave exactly as they do on the tiers below. Nothing in the higher tier improves detection and nothing in the lower tier is deliberately weakened. It is worth being blunt about what identity services can and cannot do, because the marketing blurs it: these features respond to data that has already left your control, almost always through a breach at an organisation you dealt with rather than through anything that happened on your machine. They shorten the time between exposure and your knowing. They do not prevent the exposure and they cannot retrieve the data.

The cost of this tier is not performance. The identity components are cloud services with a thin presence in the application, so there is no additional scanning and no new background agent of consequence. The cost is attention: more alerts, and cleanup tools that only produce a result if you act on what they show you. A subscriber who ignores the notifications gets nothing at all from the money, and that is a judgement to make about yourself before you buy rather than after the third alert.

Full reference

What McAfee publishes at this tier

Premium against the tiers either side

Read the bottom row. It is the only published difference between Premium and Advanced, and it is the whole of the argument for moving up.

The free route, and when it is enough

A good deal of this is achievable without paying, and it is only fair to say so. A password manager that flags breached credentials covers the credential half of the monitoring. A free breach notification service covers much of the rest. In the European Union and the United Kingdom, data protection law gives you the right to ask an organisation to erase your personal data, and exercising it costs nothing but time and stubbornness.

The honest case for the product is scale and persistence rather than capability. It knows which sites to approach, it files repeatedly, it does not get bored, and it puts the alerts in a place you are already looking. If you are willing to do that work yourself, you do not need to pay for it. If you know perfectly well that you will not, the subscription is buying the doing rather than the knowing.

What to check before you buy

• Which identity features are listed as included on the plan sheet for your own country, rather than described in general marketing.
• Whether identity theft coverage applies where you live. McAfee names New York and Puerto Rico as excluded.
• Whether the credit features connect to a credit system in your country at all. If they do not, that is a large part of the tier switched off.
• Whether you would actually read the alerts. This is the one that decides whether the money is wasted, and only you can answer it.

Questions people ask about this