There’s nothing more unsettling than finding your private personal information on the internet. Whether it’s your email address, physical address, or information about your relatives, hackers and bad actors can scour the internet to find information about you. Unfortunately, many of these websites make it difficult to remove your information.

That’s where companies like Privacy Bee come into play. Privacy Bee works around the clock to protect the data of its members by using a variety of tools, including 24/7 monitoring, removing your personal data, and helping you search the internet safely and anonymously.

Privacy Bee offers a free privacy evaluation that can give you insight into the number of websites currently sharing your personal information. However, to really put Privacy Bee to work, you’ll need its Premier Privacy Protection Plan membership.

Privacy Bee review at a glance

Privacy Bee offers several data protection features to help you protect your privacy and remove personal data on the internet. Inside your Privacy Bee account, you can:

• View privacy exposures.
• Understand your overall privacy risk.
• Scan your email for unwanted data sharing.
• Remove your information from data brokers.

All of these features require a paid membership with Privacy Bee.

To get started with Privacy Bee, you can sign up for a free privacy evaluation. To do this, you’ll need to provide personal information to Privacy Bee, including your name, address, and email address. This data allows Privacy Bee to scan the internet for your personal data.

Privacy Bee pros and cons

What data does Privacy Bee protect?

Privacy Bee can remove and protect a variety of personally identifiable information for users including:

• Name
• Address
• Phone numbers
• Email addresses
• Social Security numbers
• Driver’s licenses
• Birthdates
• Credit scores
• Employment history
• Family member information
• Education

Our experience with Privacy Bee

Privacy Bee is chock full of features to help you protect your privacy — but only if you pay for a yearly subscription. If you sign up for the free privacy screening, you won’t get much except for a few colorful charts showing you your overall privacy risk.

The annual fee for Privacy Bee is $197. However, without a money-back guarantee or free trial, it’s hard to commit to the cost. The free privacy evaluation gives you limited access to the platform, and you have to decipher how things would work if you had a paid plan.

Getting started

If you want to use Privacy Bee, the company will ask for some personal information to get started. Privacy Bee uses this to find sources of your information throughout the internet. You can also protect family members with Privacy Bee — you’ll just need their first and last name and their email addresses.

Dashboard and reports

Privacy Bee offers a variety of reports including risk assessments, an email scan, and an exposure dashboard to help you protect your data and stop identity theft. If you have only the free membership, you won’t be able to get a lot from any of the reports without signing up for the Pro membership.

Once you create a log-in and request your free privacy evaluation, you’ll gain access to different reports, including an exposure dashboard, risk assessment, industry opt-outs, search cleanup, and more. These can be found on Privacy Bee’s left-side menu, after you’ve logged in.

Exposure history

The first report, which is labeled Dashboard, is actually an exposure history. This shows the number of sensitive data exposures that Privacy Bee has found. It will also display the number of exposures currently pending, in progress, and closed.

If you’re using a free account, you’ll notice that all of the exposures are in the pending column. These exposures will always remain pending until you pay for a membership, so Privacy Bee can start handling the exposures on your behalf.

Risk assessment

The next report available is your privacy risk assessment, which includes your Privacy Risk Score. According to Privacy Bee, “Unique to each person, this score is the result of crunching the numbers around all active privacy threats, exposed vulnerabilities, and proactive measures you've taken.”[1]

As you scroll down the dashboard, you’ll see the exposed personal information that Privacy Bee found, including name, email address, phone, and more. This dashboard will also show you the number of data breaches where your information was found.

Privacy Bee also breaks out exposed personal information into categories. We appreciated the security tips to help you avoid phishing scams, hacks, and other threats.

Email scan

Privacy Bee’s email scan feature scans your email mailbox to identify the companies that you regularly interact with and helps you specify which companies should have access to your contact information. Privacy Bee currently has the capability to scan only Gmail email addresses but indicates that Yahoo and Outlook will be coming soon.

Privacy Bee doesn’t share a lot of information about how this email service works before you set it up. To set up the email scan, you’ll need to Enable IMAP with your email service provider and follow the additional steps to get it set up.

Private web search

The private web search protects your privacy when you are using search engines. Privacy Bee doesn’t detail a lot of information about this web search tool on its website, unless you’ve signed up for an account. The private web search tool works almost like a VPN or an ad blocker, by allowing you to search the internet without companies gaining access to your information. Privacy Bee blocks any website tracking or cookies. Privacy Bee does not keep information about what you search either.

Search cleanup

The search cleanup shows the results you would find if you Googled yourself. If you have a common name like Andrew Adams, the results are all over the place. The first item was correct, while the rest were from a local news reporter with the same name.

From this screen, Privacy Bee shows you the website where your personal information is displayed, and the Privacy Bee Trust Score of that website. The Privacy Bee Trust Score is based on Privacy Bee’s research, as well as how many Privacy Bee users trust the platform. With a paid subscription, Privacy Bee will assist you in removing your personal data from the websites that you choose. However, for Privacy Bee’s help, you’ll need the Pro plan.

Data brokers

The data brokers dashboard gives you a lot of information about sites where your sensitive data has been found. If you have a Pro membership, Privacy Bee will work to remove your information from each of the data brokers. However, if you do not have a Pro membership, you can click on each of the data brokers for detailed information about how to remove your information.

If you want to remove yourself from LexisNexis, for instance, you could find instructions on how to do it from this feature. Similar to the search cleanup, we found a lot of accurate information about ourselves, but also a lot of inaccuracies as well.

Trusted companies

At the top right of your screen, you will see a section with the count of trusted and negative relationships. By selecting this, you will be able to look through a full list of all the companies that have access to your personal information based on Privacy Bee’s audit.

From this screen, you can indicate which companies should have access to your information and which companies should not. Privacy Bee can then start removing your data from the sites you indicated should not have access. You do not have to have a Pro account to specify these companies.

Additional features

Privacy Bee also offers a few additional features that make it easier to have a proactive approach to protecting your privacy. As with most of its features, they work only if you have a Pro membership.

Industry opt-outs

This feature allows you to opt out of having your information shared with common marketing companies, such as Publishers Clearing House. You can also indicate that you’d like to be removed from credit pre-screen offers or that you want to be added to the National Do Not Call Registry. You can also opt-out of WhitePages listings and other directories from this page too. These opt-outs can also help minimize the amount of junk mail you’re receiving.

Optional actions

Under optional actions, you’ll find the ability to blur your house on Google Street View and Apple Maps. This may not be something that you previously considered a privacy concern, but it’s nice to be able to do so, if you wish. Privacy Bee notes that if you do blur your house, the action is permanent and cannot be undone.

In our case, when we were testing Privacy Bee, the photo that Google displayed was incorrect, so we weren’t concerned about it being online. This is one place where you can remove information from Google.

Browser extensions

Privacy Bee has another helpful feature: its browser extensions. These extensions allow you to designate trusted sites while inside your internet browser instead of navigating back to your Privacy Bee account.

When you’re on a website, you can use the browser extension to see information about the trustworthiness of the company. You’ll be able to easily mark the company as trusted or not, and you’ll be able to create custom privacy choices for each site.

How do you know if Privacy Bee works?

Privacy Bee sends data deletion requests to data brokers on your behalf. However, it may be difficult to find out if your information was removed from different websites. If you want to double-check Privacy Bee’s work after your removal request, you can go to a data-aggregate website such as LexisNexis to see if your information is gone.

Privacy Bee touts that they have the industry’s highest removal success rating. However, Privacy Bee also says on its FAQ page that it's difficult to know if your data was actually removed. “It’s frustrating but there is no real way to know if a company has complied with your data privacy request. Really the only thing you can do is monitor your data for breaches.”

Does Privacy Bee keep your data safe?

Privacy Bee works to remove your personal information from the internet, but does Privacy Bee protect the information that you provided to them? Based on its privacy policy, Privacy Bee does not share any personal information with outside data brokers. They do keep logs of some information about how users interact with the website, what they access, and websites that users visited before and after visiting Privacy Bee.

Privacy Bee uses SSL to increase security, and they also encrypt all databases, but they do not specify which encryption method they use. Instead, they say it is “according to cybersecurity best practices.”

Privacy Bee customer support

Privacy Bee offers a few different support options, including a phone number and contact form. You’ll notice a chatbot on Privacy Bee’s website, but if you engage with the chat, it will ask for your email address so you can get a response later.

If you pay for a subscription, you’ll be able to access the Privacy Concierge. This is an additional way to contact support. When you go to the Privacy Concierge, it also tells you the average response time. When we tried it, the average response was 5 business hours.

Privacy Bee prices and subscriptions

Privacy Bee has only one plan, the Pro plan, which costs users $197 per year. Privacy Bee offers a free account that gives you access to a privacy evaluation and the ability to indicate trusted and untrusted sites. For many of Privacy Bee’s features, such as removing your personal information from data brokers, you’ll need the Pro membership.

The free membership, or privacy evaluation, will give you some insight into your overall internet privacy, but it does not give you the ability to remove data or take proactive steps to protect your data moving forward without the Pro plan.

Privacy Bee plans comparison

Privacy Bee FAQs

Bottom line: Is Privacy Bee good?

Privacy Bee is a useful data removal tool for someone who wants to erase personal information quickly from sites across the Internet. However, without a free membership or trial, it’s hard to invest $197 into a service that we don’t know if it is effective. You might find a monthly subscription to Hello Privacy (about $12 a month) easier to swallow.

Privacy Bee is easy to navigate, and it provides interesting data about your overall privacy. However, even if you pay for the service, you still have to check to see if your information is removed. You may not know if it was removed until there is a data breach and your information is jeopardized. Without knowing if your information was removed, it can be hard to stay safe online. 

Overall, we wouldn’t spend the money on Privacy Bee unless we were in a situation where information needed to be removed faster than we could do it ourselves. Privacy Bee still requires some work, so you’re not out of the woods even with the service. If you are worried about the information on a specific site, you can request that the information is removed without using Privacy Bee. It just takes a little bit of work on your part.

There are a lot of different data protection tools out there to help minimize identity theft and keep your personal information safe. One way to protect yourself is with a virtual private network (VPN). You can also download an ad blocker to minimize a company’s ability to track your internet usage. And don’t forget to look for a corresponding mobile app if you use any of these so your mobile internet activity is also protected.

Learn More

On Privacy Bee's website

---

• Easy-to-understand reports
• Comes with a Chrome extension
• Expensive

Author Details

Andrew Adams

About the Author

Andrew Strom Adams is a freelance writer focused on online privacy and digital security. He writes on various topics to help individuals protect themselves on the internet. Andrew has worked in legal marketing, technology, and startups. He has more than 12 years of experience in marketing and communications. He holds an M.B.A. from Westminster College and a B.A. in journalism from Oklahoma Baptist University. When he’s not writing, he’s playing with his two kids or watching reality TV.