When PC Magazine was new, it focused on that desktop wonder, the PC. Nowadays, we carry around computers vastly more powerful than that original PC—we just call them smartphones. Surveys show that around 15% of Americans rely strictly on mobile devices for connectivity. But when it comes to online privacy, the device you’re using makes no difference. Data brokers collect your information, hackers pick up your passwords from data breaches, and identity thieves take over your accounts, regardless of how you get online. Lookout Premium Protection keeps a watchful eye out to protect you from breaches even if you connect only through your mobile gadgets. It also offers more traditional security protection for your Android devices and (to a lesser degree) your iPhones and iPads. Lookout does the job, but, in both identity protection and mobile security, others do it even better.
What Does Lookout Cost?
You can get started with Lookout Premium Plus for $9.99 per month and switch to the yearly fee of $99.99 after you decide you like it. Note, though, that at present the yearly fee is discounted to $59.99, quite a bit less.
There’s also a Premium edition that includes only traditional security features such as antivirus and antitheft, without full-scale identity protection. That version runs $3.99 per month or $29.99 per year. You can even use Lookout for free if all you need is antivirus and limited antitheft features. At all tiers, your subscription lets you protect five devices. PCMag hasn’t covered mobile-only security apps for quite some time, so this review focuses on the Premium Plus edition.
Lookout’s combination of mobile security and identity protection is uncommon, so it’s not easy to make a direct comparison to other products. Like Lookout, IDX Privacy includes Dark Web monitoring and identity theft protection. It adds a basic VPN, automated removal of your data from online brokers, and more. You pay $9.95 per month for IDX Privacy, or $79.95 per year.
At the high end, Norton 360 with LifeLock Select costs $149.99 per year. However, in addition to LifeLock identity theft remediation, that gets you five licenses to install security on your Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS devices, five no-limits VPN licenses, and 100GB of online storage for your backups. Norton will spend up to a million dollars on lawyers and experts and will separately reimburse you for up to $25,000 in stolen funds and $25,000 in expenses directly related to identity theft. Two additional tiers increase LifeLock monetary limits, the number of security licenses, and the amount of backup storage.
A McAfee Total Protection subscription costs $159.99 per year. That sounds more expensive than Norton, but McAfee doesn’t limit the number of devices. You can install its protection on every Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS device in your household. The Identity Protection component monitors the Dark Web for your personal info, warns of dangerous social media posts, and helps you recover from identity theft, including reimbursement for costs.
IDX Privacy works best on the desktop. Norton and McAfee support all four popular platforms. Lookout is strictly mobile. Lookout, Norton, and McAfee offer identity protection in conjunction with more traditional security. Rather than compare these products based on price, you’d do better to consider which has a feature set that matches your needs.
Getting Started With Lookout
Download the app from your device’s app store, log in with your Lookout account, and boom! the product installed. What happens next depends on the platform. When you install Lookout on an iOS device, it displays panels for seven features: Security, Safe Browsing, Safe Wi-Fi, ID Scan, Breach Report, Identity Protection, and Missing Device.
Any features that need attention display in yellow or red; click those and follow the prompts. You’ll find yourself enabling Safe Browsing by installing a local filter that uses VPN technology, giving Lookout permission to track your location (to find a lost device), and trying out the ID Scan, which searches known breaches for any email address. You’ll also set up Identity Monitoring by filling in a variety of personal information. When all the panels display in green, you’re ready.
Getting started on Android takes a little more work, because the app does quite a bit more. Your best bet is to take a tour, activating all the features and giving the app the necessary permissions. Here, too, you’ll spin up a local-only VPN to filter out bad sites. You’ll turn on theft alert options and grant a variety of permissions to let the app do things like locate, lock, and wipe a lost device. If you didn’t already fill your personal information, you’ll do that here. As on iOS, green is good on the home screen, but the appearance is quite different. You see the status of Theft Protection and Identity Protection, along with an overall status icon.
Identity Monitoring
The Plus in Lookout Premium Plus consists of its identity protection features. These features are, by their nature, platform independent, but the company consciously chose to make the service mobile-only, saying “Our goal is to make enabling features as seamless as possible, rather than directing customers to a separate online portal to enter in information that can introduce additional friction and steps.”
One identity feature, ID Scan, comes with the simpler Lookout Premium as well. Submit any email address and Lookout reports the breaches that have included that address. The report isn’t interactive in any way—you can’t tap to go to the breached site and change your password. And it provides just a generic list of the type of data exposed, rather than anything specific to the individual. Products that dig deeper into exposed details generally require you to prove that you own the email account you’re checking. Without that verification, those tools could become a tool for data theft rather than an aid to privacy.
As always, ID Scan found a half-dozen or so instances where my email appeared in a breach, some as old as 2016. I’ve taken care of all necessary password changes and account cleanup, but the fact that my email appears in a known breach doesn’t change. I do wonder about several items where the source wasn’t available. Just how am I supposed to change the password when I don’t know what site was affected?
The main Identity Protection component monitors the Dark Web to make sure your personal data isn’t up for sale. To do that, it needs to know a good bit about you. You fill in a collection of personal data including up to 10 email addresses, three phone numbers, and two medical insurance numbers, as well as one driver’s license and one passport. For financial tracking, you can enter five bank accounts, 10 credit or debit cards, and your Social Security Number. The Dark Web monitoring components in IDX Privacy, Norton, and McAfee are similar, though the precise numbers allowed for different types of data vary.
Like IDX Privacy, Lookout does its best to protect you from accidentally revealing too much information on social media sites. To enable Social Networks protection, you must give Lookout access to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram accounts. Ironically, you won’t be able to monitor Facebook if you’ve followed PCMag’s advice and disabled Apps, Websites, and Games access. When I tested this feature in IDX Privacy, it was very active, flagging posts for the use of words like “steroids” and “wise-ass”. Lookout seems to stay focused on accidental release of personal information, something I just don’t do. Not surprisingly, I didn’t see any alerts from Lookout’s Social Networks tracking feature.
In addition to watching for appearances of your SSN on the Dark Web, Lookout runs searches to see where it’s found on legitimate sites. In my case, it found all my old addresses from the last 30 years, which is reasonable. But it also found an entry for a Neil King, and one for a misspelling of my name, with no further information. That seemed strange. A note on the SSN page advises talking to an Identity Protection agent if you see something strange, so I tried it. The agent explained that Lookout gets the SSN associations from real estate transactions and credit reports. If there’s a misspelling, it goes into the record. He noted that a completely unfamiliar name or address showing up would be a huge red flag for identity theft.
Breach Report
ID Scan checks whether your email was exposed in a previous breach, and Identity Protection watches in case your personal data shows up for sale on the Dark Web. The Breach Report is a bit different. It looks at your apps to determine what services you use, things like Amazon, Gmail, and Facebook. And it warns if a new breach occurs that affects any of your services. Obviously, I couldn’t test this feature—I’m not up for breaching Amazon’s security just to run a test.
We can hope that most users will never see an alert from this component. To make it just a bit less boring, Lookout adds links to reporting on the latest breaches. At the time of this writing, it reports on Crypto.com, Robinhood, Twitch, and Neiman Marcus.
Insurance and Restoration
Lookout’s breach alert ends with two big buttons, one to clear the alert and one to contact the 24/7 helpline. Once you’ve taken care of any alerts that you can, or determined that they no longer pose a threat, it’s wise to clear them. That way any new alerts will be fully visible. But if the alert is serious, like an unfamiliar address associated with your SSN, it’s time to call in the cavalry.
Even if you didn’t literally lose your wallet, an identity theft attack requires you to change out all your credit cards. Lost Wallet Recovery means that Lookout will help you deal with replacing credit and debit cards, your driver’s license, your checkbook, and other sensitive financial items.
In the event you suffer identity theft, Lookout will assign a specialist to your case. The specialist will deal with problem creditors, work with the bureaus to restore your damaged credit, and help you file an Identity Theft Affidavit plus any other necessary government documents.
The icing on the cake is the million-dollar insurance policy. Lookout will reimburse you for a variety of costs directly associated with the identity theft event. For example, the policy will reimburse fraudulent withdrawals from your accounts, pay legal fees, and pony up the cost of replacing documents. There’s reimbursement for lost wages and for necessary travel. During signup, you get access to the full details of the policy—you’d be well advised to peruse it and learn what is and isn’t covered.
As always with identity theft remediation tools, I can’t say how well, or even whether, Lookout works. We at PCMag go to great lengths to put products through real-world testing, but we’re not going so far as to invite actual identity theft and evaluate the response. Lookout’s services cover most of the bases, and the million-dollar policy reflects the company’s confidence in the remediation team.
Android Security
Lookout’s Android app strongly reflects a balance between identity features and traditional device security. Most of its home screen displays current antivirus status, with a changing line for stats such as how many safe sites visited, how many apps were deemed safe, and how many suspicious sites were flagged recently. Panels at the bottom confirm that theft protection is turned on, and let you know of any identity protection alerts.
Theft Protection
Tapping the theft protection panel brings up a page that shows your device’s location, with advice on how to locate it if it gets lost. This page points out that even if the device runs out of charge, you can still find it, as it transmits its location before going down to zero battery.
Another tab lets you configure alerts for five actions a thief might take: Multiple failed passcode attempts, SIM card removed, Airplane mode enabled, Device turned off, and Lookout uninstalled. Lookout sends such alerts via email, and each comes with a picture of whoever’s holding the phone and a location map. You can tap to send yourself a sample, which is a nice touch.
From the online console, you can locate the device and optionally view its location history; the latter may be quite helpful if you’re trying to track down a thief. In testing, Lookout mapped the device right to my house. However, unlike almost every other such service, it did not spell out the address, stating instead that the device was “near” my street.
If you think you’ve just misplaced the device somewhere around the house, tap Scream to make it emit a loud sound. This feature, which sounds like a siren, works even when the phone is muted or in Do Not Disturb mode.
When your phone’s actually lost or stolen, you want to make sure it’s locked. From the console, you can trigger a lockdown and optionally include your email, phone, and a short message. Who knows—maybe a nice person found the device and will happily return it to you! Probably not, though. When it’s clear you won’t get the device back, you can remotely trigger a factory reset. As the console page warns, “You will lose all the data on your device forever.” But that’s better than having some phone-stealing miscreant pawing through your data.
Malware Protection
Apple is famous for its locked-down operating systems. It’s hard (though not impossible) to write malware that can infect a Mac, and even harder to break into an iOS device. Windows and Android are playing catch-up, trying to attain what Apple had from the start. It’s a toss-up whether you need malware protection more on one or the other. Lookout provides protection against a wide variety of threats.
At the top of the Security page (reached by tapping the main area of the home page), you’ll see four tabs: Apps, Web, Wi-Fi, and Privacy. And at the top of the Apps tab, there’s an informative multipage panel listing malware types that Lookout blocks. It specifically calls out Trojans, Exploits, Spyware, Adware, and Chargeware. That last one is new to me; the panel explains it as apps that make credit card charges without your consent. You can tap for a full list of covered malware types, which adds nine more, among them Bots, Spam, and Click Fraud. For each type, Lookout provides a description and a discussion of the malware’s effect.
Of course, the way to avoid experiencing those types of malware is to scan your device and eliminate any that are present. Tapping the Scan Now link performs that scan, which runs quite quickly. Below that link is a history of scan and update events.
Safe Browsing
It’s smart to wipe out any malware that’s on your Android device. It’s even smarter to never download those dangerous files in the first place. That’s the purpose of Lookout’s Safe Browsing, managed on the Web tab.
Chances are good the security suite on your desktop includes a browser extension that warns when you’re about to visit a dangerous or fraudulent web page. Such extensions typically combine blacklisting of known dangers with heuristic analysis to catch the latest problem pages. That’s not how Lookout works.
Lookout uses VPN technology to filter all incoming web traffic. It’s not an actual VPN. It doesn’t connect you with a distant server to encrypt your traffic and hide your IP address. It just uses the same technology to filter network connections. As such, it can’t block a dangerous page, only an entire domain. None of my usual tests using real-world malware-hosting and phishing sites triggered a response from Lookout. My Lookout contacts supplied a couple of example domains that the company maintains for demonstrating Safe Browsing. This kind of filtering just doesn’t compare with full-powered systems that can examine each web page for dangers.
Safe Wi-Fi
There’s not much to say about the Safe Wi-Fi feature. It warns if you connect your device to a Wi-Fi network that it deems to be dangerous or compromised. Not having a compromised Wi-Fi network to hand, I couldn’t put this feature to the test.
Privacy Advisor
Just about every time you install an Android app, it asks for a few permissions—or a ton of permissions. The idea is that you’ll cast a skeptical eye on those requests and only give your blessing to permissions that make sense. Really, though, most users just allow everything, and that can be a problem.
Lookout’s Privacy Advisor lists nine significant permissions, along with how many apps have that permission. These are things like permission to use the camera, read and modify your contacts, and read or send text messages. Tapping one of the permissions opens a detailed list of apps. At your convenience, you should review those lists. Most apps are fine, but you might find something out of line. A typical example is a flashlight app that wants permission to read your contacts or send text messages.
This kind of privacy scan is almost universal in Android security apps. Of our 10 picks for best Android antivirus, all 10 include a privacy scan. Seven can snap a photo of a device thief, as Lookout does. And all but two warn when you connect to insecure Wi-Fi.
What’s Not Here
Quite a few Android security apps do their best to let you block unwanted calls and texts. This feature is a moving target; over the years Android has changed several times, rendering some techniques non-functional while opening other possibilities. Lookout doesn’t try for call and text blocking.
Any significant Android security tool needs the ability to identify and eliminate malicious apps. The Android editions of Norton 360 Deluxe and Trend Micro Maximum Security kick malware detection up a notch by identifying dangerous or suspicious apps right in the App Store before you even download them.
Bitdefender Total Security, Kaspersky Security Cloud, and McAfee AntiVirus Plus enlist your phone and your Android watch in a mutual protection pact. Once you’ve paired the devices, you’ll get a warning if they’re not close to each other, perhaps because you walked away leaving your phone on the table.
Avast Premium Security, Avira Prime, and Norton come with a fully-functional no-limits VPN. Bitdefender and Kaspersky also include VPN protection, but it’s feature-limited, with full functionality requiring additional payment.
Along with its identity protection features, Lookout brings you all the essentials of Android security but doesn’t jump to the bonus level. It’s also strictly mobile, where our most-liked competing products protect desktop devices as well.
Limited iPhone and iPad Protection
Looking just at identity and privacy protection, Lookout’s iPhone and iPad app has everything found in the Android edition. ID Scan, Breach Report, Identity Protection, SSN Trace, it’s all there. As on Android, Safe Browsing works by filtering network traffic through a local-only VPN. Safe Wi-Fi warns if you make a shady connection.
Antitheft is limited compared to the Android edition, and Security is nearly non-existent. You can locate the device around the house by making it scream. I assume the sound is the same as on Android—in testing, I couldn’t make this feature work.
You can locate a lost device, and display a message begging for its return, but you can’t lock or wipe it remotely. It alerts you on SIM card removal and on going into Airplane Mode, but it can’t snap a photo of a thief who’s making unsuccessful login attempts.
Tap the Security panel on the main window and you won’t find much to celebrate. If your device’s operating system needs an update, Lookout will warn you (echoing the warning you probably got from the device itself). And it will gripe if you don’t have a passcode set. That’s the extent of security features in this edition.
Mobile-Only Identity Protection
While most identity protection services we’ve encountered focus on the desktop, with added support for mobile devices, Lookout Premium Plus is strictly mobile. It offers the expected dark web monitoring and breach reporting, and its identity theft remediation services are backed by a promise to pay up to a million dollars if necessary. It provides serviceable antivirus and antitheft features for your Android devices but, like most security products, can’t do much for security if you’re an iOS aficionado.
IDX Privacy strongly overlaps Lookout’s identity protection features, includes a basic VPN, blocks online trackers, and removes your personal info from online data brokers. Privacy Bee and Optery center around data broker cleanup; Optery is our Editors’ Choice in that realm. For general Android security, our top Android antivirus apps do more than Lookout, with full cross-platform support and, in some cases, their own takes on identity protection. Lookout does its job, but others do better.
