Peacock

Is Peacock safe?

For watching TV, yes. Peacock is NBCUniversal's paid streaming service, with licensed shows, films and live sport, and nobody can message you or your children through it. We score it 55/100, a little below Paramount+ and Hulu (both 58).

The weak points are tracking, a login with no second step and a record on cancellations. Apple's label lists more kinds of tracking data than most rivals, including your home address, and Los Angeles County settled with Peacock for $3.6 million in 2025 over subscriptions that were hard to cancel.

What Peacock tracks

The "Data Used to Track You" section of Peacock's App Store label covers five categories: purchase history, coarse location, physical address, user and device IDs, and product interaction and advertising data. Search history and email are collected too, linked to your identity.

The Android app tells the same story. Google Play's data safety section says Peacock shares your name, email, user IDs, address, approximate location, device IDs and app activity with other companies, mostly for advertising or marketing.

NBCUniversal's privacy policy, last updated on 17 November 2025, explains where the extra detail comes from. It receives data from "advertising and analytics partners, consumer data resellers, public records databases", including household demographics and purchasing data, and it makes inferences about your preferences. NBCUniversal is part of Comcast, whose family includes Xfinity and Sky, and the policy says it receives data from these related businesses too. It treats a Global Privacy Control signal as an opt-out only "to the extent required by applicable law".

Profiles and parental controls

Peacock is better than most streaming apps here. When you create a profile you choose Kids, Teen or Adult. Kids profiles have three maturity levels: Little Kids (TV-Y), Older Kids (TV-Y7 and G) and Family (TV-PG and PG). Teen profiles can go up to TV-14 and PG-13.

The ratings are only half the job. Unless you add a 4-digit PIN to the adult profiles, a child can switch to yours from the profile screen. Both settings are changed on the Who's Watching? page in a web browser, with the account password. A TV shows a QR code that opens the setting on your phone instead. Anyone who knows the account password can change them, so keep it from older children.

Account security

We found no reported breach of Peacock accounts, but protection is basic. We found no two-step login, so a password reused on another site, or typed into a phishing page, is enough to take an account over along with its saved payment method. We also found no active public bug bounty for NBCUniversal, Peacock or Comcast on HackerOne or Bugcrowd.

The cancellation settlement and the privacy suits

In July 2025 Los Angeles County sued Peacock TV in the county's Superior Court over its auto-renewal and cancellation practices, and filed a proposed settlement the same day. Peacock agreed to pay $3.6 million: $2 million in civil penalties, $1.5 million to the county's Department of Consumer and Business Affairs and $100,000 for the cost of the investigation. It must show renewal terms clearly, get your consent before turning a trial into a paid plan, and offer a way to cancel at once. Peacock did not admit wrongdoing, and we found no signed copy of the judgment.

Private lawsuits under the US Video Privacy Protection Act are only context for our score. In Afriyie v. NBCUniversal, viewers said the Peacock and CNBC apps sent viewing histories to Adobe and mParticle. A federal judge in New York dismissed the app claims in March 2025, and in March 2026 refused to let the plaintiffs amend the complaint and dismissed the case.

How to use Peacock safely

1. Give each child a Kids or Teen profile with the right maturity level, then add a PIN to every adult profile.
2. Use a password you do not use anywhere else, since there is no second login step.
3. Refuse the tracking prompt on iPhone, and opt out of targeted ads on NBCUniversal's Your Privacy Choices page.
4. Before a free trial ends, check the renewal date in your account and cancel there if you do not want to pay.
5. Sign in only through the app or by typing peacocktv.com yourself.

How we scored it

Scams and harmful content (75) is Peacock's strongest factor: licensed content, no contact between users and real Kids and Teen profiles. Privacy (40) is the weakest, because the label tracks you with your address and purchases and the policy adds data from resellers. Security (57) reflects a clean breach record but no two-step login, and the regulatory record (63) reflects the $3.6 million cancellation settlement.