McAfee+: One Suite t…
McAfee Total Protection buzzes with security features that protect your data and devices. With McAfee+, you gain additional powerful features to protect your privacy. One of these, the password manager, comes with the entry-level suite. But Online Account Cleanup, Personal Data Cleanup, and Social Privacy Manager are reserved for McAfee+.
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 has profiled you. That’s where Personal Data Cleanup comes in.
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On the Personal Data Cleanup page, you enter personal data that McAfee will use to find your profiles online. To start, it wants your first and last name, date of birth, and current address. After the initial scan, you can supplement this by adding an alternate name (if you have one), three phone numbers, and two more physical addresses. McAfee checks its list of usual suspects and reports anywhere it finds your data profiled.
If you’ve selected McAfee+ Premium, that’s as far as the process goes. It’s up to you to visit each offending site and ask to have your data removed. For those who purchased 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.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)
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. Norton’s Privacy Monitor feature offers a similar service covering a few dozen 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 Neopets. Chances are good that you can’t even list them all and that you haven’t touched some of them in years, even decades. 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 setting up scam protection for my review of McAfee Total Protection, I gave McAfee access to my Yahoo and Gmail accounts. This allows it to analyze all incoming messages and flag any that look scammy. Conveniently, with those permissions in place, all I had to do was pick which one should be scanned for the old account. I picked the less-used Yahoo account first.
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The scan found 11 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.
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Apparently, I cleaned up this address last time I reviewed McAfee+, as it didn’t contain any accounts I was willing to discard. I switched to tracking my much busier Gmail account.
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 pop-up. Clicking Next from the pop-up 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.
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Note that if you’ve subscribed at the Premium level, you must cancel each account manually. Automation is a perk of higher tiers.
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Until seeing McAfee’s implementation of this feature, I hadn’t really thought much about the danger of old, abandoned accounts. Getting rid of those you don’t need is a seriously smart idea. It also means giving McAfee full access to your email account, but chances are good you’ve already done that to let it detect and flag scam messages in your Inbox. If you’ve chosen not to have McAfee filter scams in your email, you may want to remove the tap on your email when you’ve finished working through all the old accounts. You’re paying more attention now, less likely to abandon more accounts. And you can always hook up your email for a checkup in six months or so.
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 what are the correct privacy settings? Even if you sort it out, the site in question might later 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.
You’ll find this feature in the Privacy section of the main menu. Like Online Account Cleanup just above, it has the box-and-arrow icon that means clicking it will send you online to manage the feature. And from the online dashboard, you’ll install the Social Privacy Manager extension for your default browser. Note that you get the full power of this feature even at the entry-level Premium tier.
McAfee offers to tighten up your privacy settings for Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn, TikTok, 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.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)
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 would be 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. As you log in to link each account, the browser extension captures your connection.
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Even though I’ve used this helpful advisor the last time I reviewed McAfee+, it still found three Facebook settings for me to review. I leave my employment, college, and high school information publicly visible, on the chance it will help old friends find me. McAfee reasonably advises changing those to Friends only, but I continue to walk on the wild side.
Testing this feature a couple of years ago, 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.
(Credit: McAfee/PCMag)
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, unless they clash with the way you use the particular social account. Once you’ve completed this review, you may want to unlink the accounts and delete the extension, just to tie up loose ends.
