What the data broker industry is doing with your personal information — new privacy laws, enforcement actions, breaches, and plain-language explainers, as well as online privacy tips.
Reviews
Kroll monitoring is legit. Kroll is a large New York risk-advisory firm, and organizations that lose people's data hire it to mail the breach letters and run free identity monitoring for the people affected.
Guardio is a legitimate browser-security product from a company called Guardio Ltd. It blocks phishing sites, malicious extensions and scam pop-ups, and for one person it costs $18.99 a month or $143.88 a year as of October 2026.
Filed under ReviewsLifeLock cost runs from $124.99 a year ($10.42 a month) for the Core plan to $349.99 a year ($29.17 a month) for Total when you pay annually, or $12.49 to $34.99 a month on monthly billing, as of October 2026. Two things on the price page take some hunting for.
Filed under ReviewsTo cancel IdentityIQ, call 877-875-4347 during business hours (Monday to Friday 7:00 am to 6:00 pm Central, Saturday 8:30 am to 5:00 pm Central), or use the cancel button under Manage Your Plan in the member dashboard if your account shows one. That's the whole answer from the company's own FAQ and its terms of service.
Filed under Reviews
BeenVerified is legit: a real New York company, owned by The Lifetime Value Co., that has legally resold public records since 2007, and that legality is exactly why your address, age and relatives are sitting on it. People who type "is been verified legit" into Google are usually not asking whether the subscription works.
Filed under ReviewsIDCrawl is a real, free people-search engine, and it is safe in the sense that it will not charge your card or install anything. The question that matters is whether it is safe to be on, and the answer is less comfortable: it stitches your public social profiles, usernames, photos, and phone and email listings into one page that anyone can open without an...
Filed under Reviews
Instant Checkmate is a legitimate company, not a scam. Which means you'll get a real report if you pay. But it is not a legal background check, its accuracy claims have twice drawn FTC action, and 11.9 million of its customers' own account details ended up leaked online in 2023.
Filed under ReviewsSpokeo is legitimate in the narrow sense but its profiles mix genuine records with stale addresses and other people's data, and the profile it built about you is visible to anyone who pays.
Filed under ReviewsPeopleConnect is a real US company (legitimate in the sense that it exists, operates legally, and will actually suppress your listing if you ask), and it is the single operation behind TruthFinder, Intelius, Instant Checkmate, US Search, and Classmates.com, majority-owned since 2015 by the private equity firm H.I.G. Capital.
Filed under Reviews
TruthFinder is a legitimate company, not a scam. But it is not the "real background check" its marketing implies, its reports are frequently wrong, and the FTC has already ordered it to stop overstating what it finds.
Filed under ReviewsNothing here matches that search.