I recently upgraded a few household computers to NIS2012 after reading very positive reviews.
To my dismay, the ID-Safe capabilities that we had relied upon are now gone because portable profiles
are no longer supported, the "replacement" on-line vaults are limited to one per Norton Account, and all
our systems are associated with the same Norton Account (for convenience, and due to the use of 3-packs).
With NIS2011 each user on our shared home systems (each user has their own logins on multiple computers)
could use portable ID Safe profiles in order to maintain security, privacy and synchronization. This worked
very well. Each person could even have multiple portable profiles to maintain strict separation of information by
account groups. They could use that profile on any computer running NIS2011 that they trusted - simple and
effective, password protected, and no requirement for multiple individuals to know how to login to the common
Norton Account covering those computers.
NIS2012 eliminated the portable profiles, but offers to "convert" the portable profile to a local or online vault.
This does not even come near to reproducing the capabilities of having portable profiles - you can't have
multiple profiles (vaults) per user, and multiple users cannot synchronize (using on-line vaults) because
there is just one on-line vault available to all users with home system(s) on the same Norton account.
I want to reconfirm that the "on-line" vault does not reproduce portable profile capability, even though
it is offered as a way to synchronize across computers. Namely:
1. There is only one on-line vault available per Norton Account, although multiple users may share
computers associated associated with the same computers. This means that each user can not
have their own personal (possibly multiple) on-line vaults - they must either manually synchronize
local vaults on multiple systems, or share a common on-line vault (which is absurd from a security
standpoint).
2. One cannot create extra "Norton Accounts" in order to maintain multiple vaults either individually
or for different users within a household whose computers are associated with the same NIS Account.
That is, the "Norton Account" used to maintain information about installations (which can include 3-pack
installs commonly used in households) are the same as the "Norton Accounts" used to hold vaults.
3. There is no easy way for a user to maintain multiple ID-Safe profiles with the same system and login.
The best one can do is create multiple login identities, and create local ID-Safe profiles for each, but one
can't sync between systems (due to the single vault per Norton Account limitation, which makes on-line
vaults useless in this case).
I am quite upset - we had a very useful, portable security approach before - and now it appears to be
completely gone. The literature describing NIS2012 ID-Safe does not warn that significant ID-Safe
capabilities will be lost in upgrading from NIS2011 to NIS2012. An online support chat confirmed the
degredation of capability, but I'm not sure the advisor really understood the nature or seriousness of
the implications.
Thanks for any clarifying information. I have searched extensively to determine how one can maintain
pre-existing capabilities after moving to NIS2012, and have found nothing except one vault
per user on a computer, and one on-line vault per Norton Account - with nothing suggesting one can
generate additional Norton accounts to hold distinct on-line vaults either for the same user, or different
users sharing systems but having their own local computer logins.
BTW, it was also handy with NIS2011 that the ID-Safe profiles were named. This also went away.