Like when I read 3 Billion National Public Data Records with SSNs, Addresses Dumped Online, am I supposed to access that data dump or something to see if I got pwned? Are there equivalents to haveibeenpwned.com for this type of stuff? Any guides on what to do when these happen? I feel like I’m doomscrolling or watching the news, and feeling depressed about the world as a result because I should be doing something but I can’t or it seems like I can’t.
Even though I know better than to put such personal info online, but that doesn’t eliminate the odds of them getting into breaches like these, and having started to be careful about digital privacy has opened my eyes to the sad state of privacy.
Don’t take on all that guilt. There are things we can do to limit our data, but a lot, dare I say the majority, is scraped from sources beyond your control. You may have great practices and security, but others may not, and those weaknesses or business arrangements are vectors for breaches like these.
We’re all in the same boat here.
We’ve all been forced into this situation and the genie will never be back in the bottle. Freeze your credit. That’s the best thing you can do at the moment. Then hopefully others aren’t able to take advantage of your data.
That’s the neat part. You don’t
To add to Possibly Linux’s precise and correct answer: Those leaks are made by hackers taking over organisation’s servers and publishing what they found, noone can control it not even orgs in question.
Actually the orgs in question can do things to secure the data before the hacking happens if they actually care
How to keep it all off the internet? Take your devices (all of them) put them in a pelican case, fill with concrete, and thow into a deep ocean trench.
Oh, also never give your name to any org. No hospital visits, for example.
Or, do some threat modeling and figure out what your risk appetite is.
First things first: Check if any data was actually leaked/breached.
Many times, the data leaks news sites like to report in the most alarmist manner, don’t actually contain any new data, and are just aggregations of older breaches that already happened. Although still worth reporting, sadly, due to the way ads and clickbait works, they are incentivized to play it up and report it as the LARGEST DATA BREACH EVER 2024 CLICK ME IMMEDIATELY.
But yeah. My recommendation: Find high quality sources which either don’t report this stuff, or I like lemmy (and used to like reddit), because when stuff like that gets posted, it gets called out by users in the comments.
