Sony to offer AllClearID Plus protection against ID theft

Identity theft has been on quite a few people's minds especially in the wake of the downtime that PSN and SOE have suffered after having personal information put at risk in hack intrusions. Now Sony has the details on an ID protection enrollment program that they are providing as a complimentary offer, free of charge, to Playstation Network and Qriocity members.

Posed here on their official blog, the service is described as good for 12 months and will inform those who subscribe to it of any unusual activity pertaining to their information and put them in touch with a staff of "licensed private investigators and identity restoration specialists". A special enrollment code will go out to members from Sony that will be good up until June 18th.

I looked the company up (Debix, Inc.) to see who they were. In addition to researching solutions to security breaches, they offer an on-call ID protection service for $9.95 per month. If someone attempts to sign up for credit under your name, an alert contacts your phone allowing you to indicate whether it is fraud or not.

Debix also offers the AllClearID service which is what Sony mentions in their release above. AllClearID has a free service plan that you can sign up for immediately, but Playstation.Blog notes that customers will be getting the AllClearID Plus service which normally costs $9.95 a month - all of which will be covered by Sony for twelve months of monitoring. As of this writing, Sony hasn't yet emailed the activation codes needed to sign up for it yet, but AllClearID has already made itself ready.

It's a big, and potentially expensive, step for Sony to make, but it also makes a point on what they are willing to do to rebuild the trust of their customers. As their team begin the "final stages" on the improvements they've made to the system, all we can do is wait and see what they do next.