Approximately 13 million U.S. residents have their identities stolen each year with financial losses totaling upwards of $15 billion. Civic.com’s new proactive approach to identity gives you the power to secure your information before any damage is done. Civic, which bills itself as an “identity protection network” and launches in beta today, hinges on a simple enough premise: If your Social Security number is used, you’ll get a push notification.
Civic is a free identity management service that allows you to protect and authorize the use of your identity in real-time. Civic lets you know when new accounts are opened with your personal information. This gives you the control to identify which ones were authorized by you and take action on the ones that weren’t. The company also offers additional features to help protect your identity such as credit report alerting, ID theft recovery insurance, and access to 24/7 fraud support.
Civic is free, and if you sign up you get $1 million of identity theft insurance for as long as you use the app. There’s an always-open help line if you get in an identity theft quagmire. And if the company where the fraud occurred pays to partner with Civic, you’ll have the option to cancel transactions before they go through. The company’s revenue comes from partnering with companies to combat fraud and sharing in the savings created.
The company is new, having announced its first product today. I haven’t tried it so cannot vouch for its services. However, I must say that today’s announcement certainly sounds attractive.
Civic is available at https://www.civic.com.
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Categories: Current Affairs
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Nice idea – but it obviously requires turning over your SSN to a completely unknown company.
And while free is nice, how *are* they going to make money?
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Great question, Wendy! This is precisely my question. How can they offer $1 million in “insurance” and what’s their revenue model. Those are easy claims to make, but the devil is always in the details.
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