They say all good things eventually come to an end. And you can add this Discover account holder perk to the list.
Discover recently notified cardholders that it will be discontinuing its free Online Privacy Protection benefit effective January 15, 2026.
It appears that Capital One, which recently acquired Discover, does not plan to continue offering this free service. And that’s a real shame.
Let’s take a look at what they’re saying about removing this useful benefit and how customers who were taking advantage of it may move forward.
What Online Privacy Protection Was
This no-cost benefit, which money expert Clark Howard touted for years as a “fantastic” perk, provided Discover credit card customers and bank account holders with free help removing their personal information from websites that collect and sell their names, addresses, and other details to shady actors on the internet.
Some context:
There is a fairly large group of data mining websites that build online profiles about you to sell to third parties. And they’re doing it legally.
Personal information found on these sites can include your name, age, address, phone number and email address. (Your Social Security number and banking information are not available for sale on these people-search sites.)
Once these profiles are built, they are both searchable by the public and can also be sold to third parties who use them for contact lists for products and services, and, in some cases, for scams.
Discover developed this benefit to help mitigate exposure to this third-party use of personal information.
This helped not only reduce the number of unwanted phone calls and emails users received but also served as a small part of safeguarding against potential identity theft.
How Online Privacy Protection Worked
Once you opted in to the service on the Discover app, Discover’s Online Privacy Protection sent requests to 10 popular name search sites asking that your information be removed from the site, opted you out of future data collection with the sites and then monitored the sites every 90 days to ensure that your information doesn’t return.
The “name search” sites covered were:
What Discover Is Saying About Removing This Perk
On November 20th, Discover sent cardholders and bank account customers a notification about the removal of this free benefit.
Here’s what it looked like:
When you land on their FAQ page about the cancellation, they give the following generic explanation for “why” it’s going away:
“We have made the decision to discontinue Online Privacy Protection from Discover, a free optional service that scans certain people-search websites for personal information, for all of our customers. This means your enrollment in this product will end on January 15, 2026.”
What Are Some Online Privacy Protection Alternatives?
While I’m not sure you’ll get an exact replacement for this useful benefit, there are some things you can do to help keep your personal information off these data aggregation websites.
- Opt yourself out on the individual websites. This is a bit time-consuming, and the process varies from site to site, but Discover says that many of these sites allow you to opt out on your own. But since Discover was covering 10 of them for you with no action required, there’s no doubt this is an effort-intensive solution.
- Use a one-time privacy scan to keep yourself informed. Experian offers a free one-time personal privacy scan. This does not remove your name from the databases, nor does it opt you out of being on them, but it does identify where your name and address may be logged. From there, you’d be able to opt yourself out on those individual sites. Note that Experian is likely to use this as a funnel for selling you on their subscription-based identity protection services.
Generally speaking, we do not recommend paying for any service that promises to monitor your personal information on the web.
Were you taking advantage of this Discover perk? What will you do when it goes away? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the Clark.com community.
