How We Evaluated Reputation

Giving your identifying information to anyone can be a risk, so why would you give it up to a company you know nothing about? One of the most important factors in entrusting a company with your personal information, identity, and even your power of attorney is simply how much you can trust them. Before giving your information to anyone, especially a company entrusted with your identity, you should make sure that you can put your trust in their service. After all, it only makes sense that you would look into somebody’s reputation if you are going to hand over your reputation to them.

We measured how much to trust an identity theft protection company by looking into a few key aspects. First we checked to make sure that the business has been accredited by the Better Business Bureau. Most of the services we evaluated have been accredited by the BBB. However, we were unable to obtain any information on IDarmor or LockDownMyID, probably because they are such new services. We also found that IDWatch service provider Intelius is not accredited by the BBB due to an unacceptably slow response to complaints.

Though we certainly understand new and innovative companies and services, success over time is important to consider when evaluating who to entrust with your identity. And while identity theft is a relatively new crime, some corporations have been dealing with it longer than others and have more experience.

Customer satisfaction is hard to gauge, but nonetheless very important when determining which identity theft protection service is safe for your information. We evaluated each service provider by seeing what actual customers have to say and how they rate performance compared to others. We recognize that there has been quite a bit of bad press and several critiques of identity theft protection services, so rather than just seeing what anyone has to say we evaluated reviews and critiques that we deemed credible and legitimate.  After assessing a number of reviews and customer critiques we took an average of the reviews and present it in a percentage.

For example, if LifeLock received reviews such as:

• 100% Satisfaction
• 2 ½ out of 3 stars
• 5 ½ out of 6 stars
• 80% rating
• 8 out of 10 stars
• 2 thumbs up
• 9 out of 10 stars

We take the average of these percentages and come up with 89% overall customer satisfaction.

    We encourage you to find which identity theft protection service has the right features and services by seeing our side-by-side comparison, and then make sure that it’s from a company you can trust. Or jump straight to our review of LifeLock, the service that we found to be the best overall identity theft protection service.