McAfee+

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In the modern world, you probably have a horde of devices that need security protection, running a zoo of different operating systems. The McAfee+ security suite has you covered, with protection for all the devices in your household. At its higher subscription tiers, it provides 24/7 help to recover from the effects of identity theft, with up to two million dollars in insurance to cover your costs. It also works hard to protect your privacy, making identity theft less likely. McAfee+ is the most complete solution in the company's line, and its combination of unlimited device security with identity protection is quite appealing. Norton’s LifeLock division has been defending against identity theft for even longer, though, and Norton 360 With LifeLock remains an Editors’ Choice for a security suite with identity protection. Bitdefender Ultimate Security shares that honor, combining full-powered identity protection with device-level protection.

McAfee+ vs. McAfee Total Protection

Device-level security suite protection in McAfee+ is precisely the same as what you get with McAfee Total Protection. All the additional features in McAfee+ are in the identity protection realm. That being the case, I’ll ask you to read my review of Total Protection before you continue with this review. That leaves me free to focus on the features that distinguish McAfee+.

Very briefly, McAfee Total Protection comes in one-, three-, and five-license subscription packs. It earned near-perfect scores in lab tests and mostly excellent scores in our own tests, though it totally missed a brace of ransomware samples. Over the last few years, the service has been shedding features that the developers found to be less essential, such as spam filtering and parental control. More recently, it dropped its network protection scanner, vulnerability scanner, and more. Without the lure of unlimited device licenses, McAfee Total Protection isn’t as attractive a choice as it once was.

How Much Does McAfee+ Cost?

McAfee+ has three service tiers: Premium, Advanced, and Ultimate. At each tier, your subscription lets you add protection to every device in your household. That includes the expected Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS devices, as well as Chromebooks and ARM-based laptops.

The Premium version of McAfee+ is effectively the same as McAfee Total Protection but with unlimited licenses, while the two higher tiers add additional identity features. McAfee+ Premium costs $149.99 per year, $10 more than a 10-license subscription for ZoneAlarm Extreme Security NextGen or F-Secure Total. At the Advanced level, you pay $199.99 per year for McAfee+, and the Ultimate edition costs $279.99.

The most similar competitor is Norton 360 With LifeLock, which also comes in three tiers, Select, Advantage, and Ultimate, costing $149.99, $249.99, and $349.99 per year, respectively. However, only the Ultimate edition gives you unlimited Norton licenses. With that edition, you also get unlimited VPN licenses, the highest level of LifeLock protection, and 500GB of hosted storage for your online backups.

With Panda Software’s product line, you can get unlimited licenses at three levels: Advanced, Complete, and Premium. But even though Panda Dome Premium costs $318.99—more than the top-tier McAfee+ Ultimate and nearly as much as Norton’s unlimited tier—it doesn’t offer any identity protection features.

In this review, I cover McAfee+ Ultimate, but I’ll note how features differ at the other McAfee+ tiers.

Can I Protect My Family With McAfee+?

When originally released, McAfee+ covered identity protection for just one individual, with a $20 Family plan option at each level that simply added McAfee Safe Family. In January 2023, the company enhanced the Family plan to include identity protection for two adults and four children. The Premium level doesn’t include identity protection, as noted, but the $169.99 Family plan gives each family member basic identity monitoring and licenses for password manager and VPN. The two adult members also get access to Personal Data Cleanup scanning, discussed below.

The Family plan at the Advanced and Ultimate tiers costs a bit more: $269.99 for Advanced and $424.99 for Ultimate. Note that features like credit monitoring, ransomware coverage, and the million-dollar guarantee apply specifically to the two adults. The system only performs basic identity monitoring for children, which may not be sufficient to prevent their identity data from being abused.

It’s hard to compare family plans as they’re all so different. With Aura, you can protect five individuals for $444 per year. Norton’s family plan covers two adults and five kids for $389.99 at the Select level, rising to $799.99 at the Ultimate Plus level. IDX Privacy’s plan also covers two adults and five kids but costs $701.88 per year. With almost all services, you get a bump in device protection along with adding protected individuals; McAfee+ is an exception (in a good way) because it offers unlimited devices from the start.

Getting Started With McAfee+

As with other McAfee programs, your first step involves online activation of the registration code you received with your purchase. During this process, you create or sign into your McAfee account online. I recommend opting in for auto-renewal, as doing so activates McAfee’s Virus Protection Pledge. If malware gets past the antivirus, McAfee will mobilize tech support to remote-control your system for manual cleanup. That manual cleanup would cost $89.95 on its own, so this is a good deal. In the unlikely event the cleanup fails, the company refunds your purchase price.

The main window looks much like that of Total Protection. A large panel at the upper left offers advice to improve your security or reports that everything is fine once you’ve dealt with all its advice. The AutoPilot recommendations you get from Bitdefender Total Security work in much the same way.

Like McAfee AntiVirus and McAfee Total Protection, McAfee+ offers quick access to important features in four panels across the bottom. The collection of shortcut features differs for each product. With McAfee+ you get Secure VPN, Identity Monitoring, Personal Data Cleanup, and Antivirus.

A left-rail menu includes an item titled My Protection, which opens a menu of all available features organized into four groups: Device, Identity, Privacy, and Web. A box and arrow icon on some of the menu items indicates that selecting them sends you to the online dashboard for your account. As noted, most of the features that distinguish McAfee+ are the type you manage online.

Personal Data Cleanup

During installation, McAfee+ advised me to set up Personal Data Cleanup. First, a little background. While it’s true that cyber criminals may steal your personal information, there’s also a legal business model that involves finding publicly available data, aggregating it into personal profiles, and then selling those profiles to advertisers and others. Data aggregation is legal, but to stay on the right side of the law, data aggregators must remove your data on request.

The problem is that there are hundreds of these sites, and each can have its own unique opt-out system. And, of course, you don’t necessarily know which of them have profiled you. That’s where Personal Data Cleanup comes in.

On the Personal Data Cleanup page, you enter personal data that McAfee will use to find your profiles online. You can enter one date of birth, one email address, two names, three phone numbers, and three physical addresses. McAfee checks its usual suspects and reports anywhere it found your data profiled.

If you’ve selected McAfee+ Premium, that’s as far as it goes. It’s up to you to visit each offending site and ask to have your data removed. For those who popped for the Advanced or Ultimate edition, McAfee automatically sends the opt-out request. Opting out removes your data from a broker’s site, but that doesn’t prevent that broker from reacquiring it, so McAfee runs the scan again every three months.

Unfortunately, due to my frequent testing of similar services, I didn’t have any exposed profiles for McAfee to process, so I couldn’t see this feature in action. The screenshot below was supplied by McAfee, at my request.

The exact number fluctuates, but McAfee tracks around 40 of the most popular data brokers. Some dedicated data broker monitors check many more sites. Top picks Optery and Privacy Bee process data from many hundreds of brokers. Both Optery and Privacy Bee offer a free version that, like McAfee+ Premium, reports its findings but leaves opting out as a DIY project.

Looking at other identity protection services, Aura and IDX Complete also work to remove your profile from data brokers. Aura checks around 30 sites, and IDX Complete around 100. Norton’s Privacy Monitor feature offers a similar service covering about 20 brokers; automated removal requires the add-on Privacy Monitor Assistant.

Online Account Cleanup

How many online accounts do you have? I’m talking about anything at all, from online banking to Club Penguin. Chances are good that you can’t even list them all and that you haven’t touched some of them in many years. The problem is that a breach at any of those sites could still expose your information. Maybe you’re correctly using a password manager now, but did you ever go through a phase of using the same password everywhere? If so, that promiscuous password is probably haunting your ancient accounts.

McAfee’s Online Account Cleanup addresses this problem, and it’s a winner. It identifies the dozens or (more likely) hundreds of accounts you have just lying around. If you subscribe at the Ultimate level, it does its best to automate the process of closing those you no longer need. If not, you’ll have to go to each one and close it yourself.

To manage this feat, McAfee needs full access to your email account, both to read past messages for account information and to write opt-out emails on your behalf. Also, at least for now, it can only manage its magic if your email account relies on Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo.

When I last tested this feature, I set it to work on my Gmail account, which I’ve had since Gmail first became available. That yielded over 350 accounts, which was unwieldy. This time I set it to check for accounts on a Yahoo account that gets much less use. I did learn that you can only check one account at a time. If you want to switch, you must first deactivate the email account that’s currently under examination.

The scan found over 15 accounts, flagging those it deemed risky, rarely used, or financial. By default, it displays 10 items at a time, sorted with the newest first. Those new ones are the least worrisome—it’s no surprise that an account I created last week doesn’t have massive usage. I couldn’t switch the sort order, but I found I could set it to show all the items at once, which allowed me to start at the bottom, the oldest accounts.

For each account you don’t recognize or no longer need, you first click Review to see details. The resulting page lets you know the account's age and risk level. It also tags the item with types of data often requested. For example, it tagged one online merchant with Financial, Personal, Email Address, Credit Card, Precise Location, and Gender.

You can click to keep the account, in which case it won’t appear in the list of pending items. More likely, though, you’ll click to delete it. Doing so brings up an informative and congratulatory popup. Clicking Next from the popup gets you another message, a reminder that you must keep an eye on the My Activity tab going forward, with a “Don’t show this again” checkbox. Once you click Close, you can go on to the next item for review.

If this process sounds a bit busy, well, it is. On the other hand, you don’t really want to check off dozens of accounts for removal willy-nilly. I’d suggest reviewing 10 or 12 at a time.

For several of the accounts I chose to remove, McAfee reported that it had no contact details, meaning it couldn’t submit a removal request. In such a case, you’d simply log in to the account and actively cancel it. Note that if you’ve subscribed at the Premium level, that hands-on cancellation is all that’s available to you. Automation is a perk of higher tiers.

Until seeing McAfee’s implementation of this feature, I hadn’t really thought about the danger of old, abandoned accounts. Getting rid of those you don’t need is a seriously smart idea.

Social Privacy Manager

We all know that sharing too much on social media can get you into trouble, anything from offending friends to helping scammers bamboozle you. But just what are the correct privacy settings? Even if you sort it out, the site in question can make changes to its available settings. McAfee’s Social Privacy Manager becomes your social secretary, examining all your accounts, developing recommendations for better privacy, and (with your permission) correcting those settings.

Note that this feature doesn’t appear in the menu of the main McAfee app the way Personal Data Cleanup and Online Account Cleanup do. But in the online console, it joins those two in the Privacy dashboard.

McAfee offers to tighten up your privacy settings for Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, and YouTube. A similar feature in Trend Micro Internet Security just covers Facebook, LinkedIn, and X/Twitter. In testing, McAfee’s solution proved more comprehensive.

Social media privacy isn’t a one-size-fits-all affair, so McAfee starts by asking you to pick your user type: Unplugged, Explorer, Connector, or Socializer. The tightest settings appropriate to the Unplugged user would prove too restrictive to the sharing-centric Socializer, and so on.

After trying the system, I wished for an option to assign different user types to different platforms. On X/Twitter, I’m a Socializer, broadcasting information about my new articles to everyone. But my Facebook account is just for sharing thoughts with my friends, making me a Connector. As a LinkedIn user, I’m more of an Explorer, or perhaps Unplugged—I only use LinkedIn to arrange introductions, the way it was designed.

The social Privacy Manager needs to reach into your various accounts to capture your existing privacy settings and make any needed changes. It accomplishes that using a browser extension. As you log in to link each account, the extension captures your connection.

I found the scan quite helpful. For example, it found 16 Facebook settings that matched its recommendations but suggested modifications to another four. After consideration, I accepted some of its choices and clicked to have it automatically make the changes. The last time I tested this feature, I wiped out a dozen or so settings that allowed LinkedIn to target me with ads. This time the only suggestion was that I limit who can find me using my public email. I didn’t take that advice, because I want people to find me on LinkedIn.

As with the similar Trend Micro feature, McAfee advised me to limit my X posts to followers only. But I use X to broadcast each new review—I want everyone to see those posts. I simply ignored that suggestion.

The Social Media Manager is truly useful for perfecting your privacy settings. You should run through the process and seriously consider following its recommendations. Once you’ve done so, you may want to unlink the accounts and delete the extension just to tie up loose ends.

Credit Monitoring

Clicking ID Protection in the main menu sends you to the Identity Monitoring section in the Protection Center, starting at the page of data breaches. In testing, I saw all the same breaches that remained after my review of McAfee Total Protection. Yes, even if you have multiple McAfee subscriptions, there’s only one you, so the identity features carry over.

Clicking the Home icon at the top left takes you back to the online McAfee dashboard. You can click Protection Score just below Home for a view of your score from 0 to 1000. As with other McAfee products, the Protection Score page lists simple tasks you can perform to get a higher score. You can't raise that score all the way in McAfee Total Protection, not even if you deal with every data breach and follow all the advice. To really crank up the numbers, you need to make use of the full-scale identity protection features found in McAfee+.

The My Protection menu provides access to all features, divided into Device, Identity, Privacy, and Web. Identity and Privacy each have their own dashboard. I’ve already covered the elements of the Privacy dashboard (Online Account Cleanup, Personal Data Cleanup, and Social Privacy Manager).

On the Identity dashboard, you’ll find panels for Credit Monitoring, Identity Monitoring, and Transaction Monitoring. I discussed identity monitoring in my review of McAfee Total Protection, so let’s move on to Credit Monitoring.

Clicking Set Up required me to fill in personal information such as name, date of birth, SSN, and address. I had already filled in some of this data in the Dark Web Monitoring and Personal Data Cleanup components—I guess these parts of the app don’t talk to each other. You finalize the process by entering a confirmation code texted to your phone.

With that step complete, McAfee+ fetches your credit score. Ultimate subscribers get that credit score updated daily, while those at the Advanced level receive a monthly update. Sorry, Premium users—your subscription doesn’t include credit score tracking or other identity services.

This display isn’t just a number on the page. It also includes a list of positive and negative factors that went into the credit score calculation. For each factor, you can click to learn more details, including ways to mitigate negative factors. Finally, at the bottom of the page, there’s a button to click for your full credit report. That can be overwhelming—you may be happier clicking the adjacent tab within McAfee’s display for a summary of report data. In addition to displaying credit information, McAfee+ monitors your credit for anomalies and alerts you as necessary. The Advantage tier monitors one credit bureau, while Ultimate users get all three bureaus monitored.

One way to prevent account takeover or other abuse of your credit is to put a lock or freeze on your credit reports. McAfee+ can directly lock your TransUnion report, and it also includes links and instructions for freezing all three bureaus, plus up-and-coming contender Innovis. Credit Lock is an Ultimate feature, while credit freeze is available at both the Advanced and Ultimate tiers.

You can also put a lock preventing new bank accounts in your name, freeze access to your utility bill history and to the opening of new utility accounts, and freeze accounts managed by other agencies, such as CoreLogic, DataX, and SageStream.

Transaction Monitoring

Like the similar feature in Norton and Bitdefender Ultimate Security, Transaction Monitoring closely watches your accounts and calls out any anomalies. Of course, you must give it access to any account you want tracked. This feature is powered by McAfee partner Yodlee.

The page for adding financial institutions displays big buttons for Wells Fargo, Chase, Bank of America, and seven other big names. If yours isn’t displayed, just start typing its name in the search box. You will need to log into the website of each bank you choose to track, giving McAfee access to transaction details.

The next step is to review or change the limits that will trigger a notification. Out of the box, McAfee alerts you upon detecting a deposit larger than $400 or a purchase larger than $400. If those don’t fit your financial style, change them! Once yo set up all your accounts, you can put this feature aside. If it notifies you of an anomaly, you dig in for details and, if necessary, contact the bank or merchant.

Suspicious transactions appear in a handy list. Even handier, you can remove the filter to show all transactions in this list. If you use more than one credit card and don’t always remember which card you used for what purchase, this combined list can provide a handy cross-account search option.

Identity Restoration

If identity thieves get access to your personal information, the various monitoring features should let you know about the attack quickly. Even so, the thieves may do some damage to your credit and identity. In that case, McAfee’s Licensed Restoration Experts can help. Identity restoration is available at the Advanced and Ultimate levels.

When your identity problems stem from a lost wallet, the restoration experts handle canceling and replacing the IDs and credit/debit cards for you and arranging for replacements. Bitdefender Ultimate, among others, has you record the various cards found in your wallet during setup to make the recovery process easier. With McAfee, as with Aura and IDShield, the restoration experts jump in to help without requiring that you have previously recorded your wallet contents.

McAfee backs the restoration process with a guarantee to spend up to a million dollars on identity restoration and on reimbursing any stolen funds—two million for Ultimate subscribers. That million-dollar guarantee is standard in this field, though some offer even more. For example, upgrading Bitdefender Ultimate Security to the Plus level also raises the guarantee to two million and adds $25,000 specifically for ransomware losses. McAfee+ offers the same $25,000 ransomware addendum at the Ultimate level. Norton’s top level of LifeLock protection backs the restoration process with a total of three million dollars.

If you dig into the actual insurance policy, you’ll find that there are some limits on specific expenditures. For example, McAfee allocates no more than $1,000 each for initial legal consultation, travel expenses, child care, and CPA costs. You can be reimbursed for lost wages, but only up to $1,500 per week and for no more than eight weeks. These sub-limits are common, though Norton doesn’t use them.

Verdict: McAfee's Top Suite

With security protection for all the devices in your household and near-perfect lab scores under Windows, McAfee+ is the big kahuna of the company's security product line. At its Advanced and Premium tiers, it offers full identity monitoring and identity theft remediation rivaling that of competing suites. The search for abandoned accounts is particularly clever. Even so, Norton 360 With LifeLock remains our Editors’ Choice for identity theft protection with local device security. Its top tier costs more than McAfee’s, but you get unlimited cross-platform device protection and OG identity theft remediation. If you're looking for a top security mega-suite without worrying about identity theft, Bitdefender Ultimate Security is our Editors' Choice, with perfect lab scores and a wealth of security features for Windows, plus protection for Android, iOS, and macOS.