About This Benefit
Discover recently launched a new free benefit that helps remove your personal information from certain websites, improving your privacy and security. In today’s era of constant data leaks, this service can be quite useful, since reducing your exposed information can also lower the risk of identity theft or scams.
For now, this service can only be activated and used in the Discover app, and it is free.
This service continuously monitors some common websites that expose personal information. These sites may provide your personal information to other services, either for free or for a fee. The information can include your name, phone number, email, address, birthday, and more, so it is understandably annoying. If Discover finds your information on these sites, it will automatically contact the websites and request removal of your personal information.
How to Use It
Currently, this service can only be used in the app. After logging into the app, scroll to the bottom and you should see this feature.
Tap it to view the details, then you will need to enroll.
After that, Discover will automatically search for your exposed personal information online. In my case, it found quite a lot, and Discover then started automatically asking these partner websites to remove my personal information.
You can also go in and see which websites have exposed which pieces of your information.
For example, you can check which addresses these websites have listed for you. I noticed that many of the addresses did not seem to be mine. My guess is that Chinese names are more likely to overlap, so multiple people’s information may have been grouped together. Similarly, some of the names were not mine either, including cases involving middle names. But in any case, I just had them all removed together.
Summary
This is a pretty useful benefit, and I recommend signing up for it to reduce the risk of your personal information being exposed. Hopefully Discover will continue adding more websites to this service and do more to help protect personal information. Since Discover cards have no annual fee, it is not a bad idea to keep one.
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