Recent revelations about how much data websites collect about you -- and how that data is used -- have made me cautious about what I sign up for online. But I’ve been online for over 20 years, and I haven’t always shown such discernment in where I created accounts. If you remember the heyday of MySpace and Neopets, you probably haven’t been either. Whether you’re concerned about how a company will use your data, worried about a data breach or simply want to reduce inbox clutter, closing accounts can be a great idea.

Thankfully, the McAfee online account cleanup tool can help you improve your digital hygiene. This tool found over 450 accounts connected to my email address, including accounts on sites I hadn’t thought about in years, like the website of a dentist I only went to twice in 2022. It then gave me the tools to quickly eliminate those accounts, letting me regain control of my online presence with minimal fuss.

I found McAfee’s online account cleanup tool so helpful that it convinced me of the value of a full McAfee cybersecurity suite. Microsoft Defender does a great job of guarding against malware like viruses, but McAfee’s antivirus is similarly effective, and its additional tools offer many more layers of protection from threats like phishing and social engineering scams.

McAfee’s online account cleanup tool is so helpful that it makes me want to switch from Microsoft Defender

None of the cybersecurity suites I’ve tested have anything quite like McAfee’s online account cleanup tool. It’s not just that the search is fast (though it is) or that it finds more accounts than similar tools I’ve tested (though it does). It’s also the way it organizes accounts so you can easily find the ones you want to eliminate and simplifies sending account removal requests.

Technically, I could’ve cleaned up these accounts on my own. I have the know-how to find accounts connected to my email address, and I’m more than capable of sending an account removal request template to companies. But it would’ve taken me many, many hours, and something almost inevitably would’ve slipped through my all-too-human fingers. I’m not sure I ever would’ve figured out I had an account on OrphanBlack.com, for example.

McAfee’s online account cleanup tool is also a great example of why I often recommend buying third-party antivirus software. The antivirus built into your operating system -- whether that’s Microsoft Defender on Windows or XProtect on MacOS -- protects you from malware, but that’s all it does.

With recent increases in social engineering schemes, like phishing attempts and scams, malware isn't the only threat you'll need to worry about. As much as I appreciate the protection I’ve received from Microsoft Defender, my increasing awareness of my digital vulnerability leaves me wanting more. 

McAfee’s online account cleanup tool is one of the best privacy-enhancing tools I’ve tested, minimizing your digital footprint and thereby reducing opportunities for dark web breaches or unauthorized sales of your data. Moreover, the plans featuring McAfee’s online account cleaner -- McAfee Plus Advanced and McAfee Plus Ultimate -- have other privacy and identity theft protection tools, including up to $2 million of identity theft insurance. Unlike Bitdefender, McAfee extends identity theft protection to many people around the world, including Canadians like me.

McAfee’s online account cleanup tool helps you find and delete old accounts

McAfee digs deep into your email address’s history to find as many accounts you’ve created with it as possible. Despite how deep this search is -- my own search found accounts I haven’t logged in to since 2016 -- it only took a few minutes to find the first 77 accounts connected to my email address and an hour to find the rest of them.

McAfee then organized my accounts into three categories: high-risk accounts, unused/rarely used accounts and accounts connected to my financial information. This helped me avoid feeling overwhelmed by letting me review short lists rather than having to face all of my accounts at once. McAfee’s online account cleanup tool made it easy and accessible to audit my digital footprint by recommending a few accounts to delete right away.

I tested McAfee Plus Ultimate, so all I had to do to eliminate my accounts was click a couple of buttons, and McAfee requested account removal on my behalf. McAfee says this can save you up to 10 hours, but with the number of accounts connected to my email address, I’m pretty sure I could save more like 20 or 30 hours this way.

McAfee’s online account cleanup tool isn’t the only one on the market, but it is the best of those I’ve tested. Bitdefender’s online account cleanup is wrapped into its general data removal tools, making it difficult to distinguish sites you’ve created accounts with from other sites storing your data. Norton, meanwhile, only offers its online account cleanup and data removal service as part of the Privacy Monitor Assistant, which costs $110 a year and you can't buy it as part of an antivirus bundle.

Here’s how I use McAfee’s online account cleanup tool to tidy up my digital hygiene

It only took me four steps to start cleaning up my digital footprint with McAfee’s online account cleanup tool.

Select the online account cleanup tool

I found the online account cleanup tool near the center of my McAfee account dashboard.

Connect my email address

Next, I typed the email address I wanted to connect to for online account cleanup into the box provided. In most cases, this will be the email address connected to your McAfee account, but I synced an older email account to really put it through its paces. Note that you can only have one email account connected at a time. However, once you’ve deleted concerning accounts related to one email address, you can run a second online account cleanup scan for a different email address.

McAfee then connected me to Gmail and requested the permissions it needed to scan my email. This process will likely look similar across popular email clients, though you may have to take extra steps if you’re using a custom solution.

Wait for McAfee to scan for online accounts

McAfee’s online account cleanup tool ran its first scan in roughly five minutes, finding 77 accounts. I could’ve started cleaning my accounts right away, but I had a feeling there were more to find, so I explored other aspects of McAfee review and returned to the online account cleanup tool an hour later. McAfee had found almost 400 other accounts during that hour, bringing my total count up to 455.

Select a list and start cleanup

McAfee sorted the accounts it found into three lists: high-risk (accounts likely to have a data breach), rarely used and financial data (accounts connected to my credit card or other financial information). This allowed me to prioritize accounts based on my most pressing concerns.

I selected the high-risk accounts, both to protect myself from data breaches and because it was the smallest (and therefore least intimidating) list. I then clicked Review on the first account listed in McAfee’s Get Started area. This opened a box with more information about the website’s risk level and the types of data shared with it.

I assessed this information and, based on the risk level, clicked Delete Account. The first time I did this, McAfee asked for some additional permissions. Once those permissions were granted, all further account deletion requests were sent instantly as I clicked.

Note: McAfee only sends account deletion requests on your behalf if you’re on the McAfee Plus Ultimate plan. You’ll have to send requests yourself if you’re using McAfee Plus Advanced.

How McAfee’s additional tools can help you further reduce your digital footprint

McAfee further assists you with online security through identity monitoring, where you enter information like your email address to have McAfee continuously scan the dark web for it and send you real-time alerts of data breaches. McAfee will also find data breaches going back several years. McAfee can’t remove your data from the dark web -- that’s almost impossible -- but it does provide advice for dealing with these breaches, such as changing the passwords of affected accounts. McAfee can monitor the web for a wide range of information, including your phone number, mailing address and even government ID.

The personal data cleanup tool, meanwhile, is a data removal service that finds your information on data broker and people-finder websites. This is a great complementary service to the online account cleanup tool: deleting accounts can reduce your risk of data breaches due to illegal activity, while the personal data cleanup tool helps you find information on technically legal but potentially problematic sites. You can then either manually send data removal requests (if you’re on McAfee Plus Advanced) or have McAfee do it for you (if you’re on McAfee Plus Ultimate).

McAfee helped keep me safe in other ways

McAfee offers other safety tools as well. The most well-known is its antivirus software, which consistently earns top marks for protection from third-party labs like AV-Test. I also enjoyed McAfee’s user-friendly interface and its minimal resource usage during background operation. However, McAfee used an enormous amount of my CPU during scans, so it’s not ideal for everyone -- especially not users with older or under-resourced machines, and folks who need to perform high-resource tasks, like video editing and gaming, while their antivirus software runs.

McAfee plans bundle various tools, depending on the plan, from password managers to monitoring software.

Password manager

The question isn’t whether or not you should use a password manager, but rather which one to use. McAfee offers a password manager for generating safe passwords and tracking all your passwords so you don’t have to remember everything yourself. McAfee’s password manager uses the industry-standard AES-256 encryption method to keep your stored logins safe. While this is a nice benefit of McAfee, you can also get a password manager cheap or even for free.

Social media privacy manager

McAfee’s social media privacy manager is available for quickly optimizing privacy settings across numerous social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. I enjoyed the intuitive nature of this tool and the range of social media platforms it connected to. While McAfee’s social media privacy manager didn’t offer anything I couldn’t do on my own, it saved me from having to separately log into every account to turn off things like ad tracking.

WebAdvisor plugin

The WebAdvisor plugin scans URLs of sites recommended by search engines to determine whether or not they’re safe. While I prefer the browser safety plugins from Bitdefender and Malwarebytes because they offer more advanced tools for blocking things like ad trackers, WebAdvisor may be worthwhile if you’ve already bought into the McAfee ecosystem.

Credit monitoring

McAfee’s credit monitoring keeps track of your credit score and financial activity, alerting you instantly to anything suspicious. This helps you be proactive about protecting yourself from fraud without having to constantly check your accounts. You can also use McAfee’s Credit Lock feature to freeze your credit if suspicious activity is detected.

Identity restoration

You can regain control of your identity if it is stolen with identity restoration support, accompanied by up to $2 million of identity theft protection to help you recoup lost funds.

McAfee offers additional cybersecurity tools, but I didn’t find the VPN or scam detector particularly useful

McAfee offers a scam detector that scans emails, text messages and phone calls for signs of phishing and other scams. However, during my tests, this tool didn’t flag anything that the spam filters built into things like Gmail didn’t pick up. I didn’t see any evidence of the scam detector at work, either, which made it difficult to gauge this tool’s effectiveness. But just because McAfee's scam detector didn’t flag anything suspicious doesn’t mean it doesn’t work -- it may simply mean I didn’t get anything that slipped past my existing spam filters, like the ones in Gmail. 

Similarly, while McAfee offers a VPN, I can’t recommend it. McAfee’s VPN lacks privacy features we usually look for, like obfuscated servers (which try to hide the fact that you’re using a VPN). It also caused a 46% average download speed loss during my testing, much higher than our recommended maximum of 25%. Unfortunately, these problems are common among VPNs from antivirus-first companies, so I recommend buying one of our vetted VPNs separately.

Start cleaning up your digital footprint with McAfee today

McAfee’s online account cleanup tool helped me quickly eliminate unused accounts created across two decades of internet use, giving me peace of mind in case of a data breach and reducing the amount of my data that can be sold. I especially appreciated how its account categories helped me prioritize what to delete first, as diving into one list of 450 accounts would’ve been overwhelming. This level of organization isn’t included in similar tools from companies like Bitdefender, making McAfee’s online account cleanup tool the best in its class.

You can do much more than delete old accounts with McAfee, too. Its identity monitoring helps you secure accounts that have experienced data breaches, while its personal data removal tool helps you delete your information from data brokers and people-finder websites. McAfee’s other cybersecurity tools include antivirus software, a password manager, credit monitoring and more to protect you from various digital threats. You can read my full McAfee review to learn more about these features.