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The Internet and our Digital Footprint
pCloud has released a Free Online Data Breach Checker that helps you learn whether your Personal Information has been exposed.
The Internet has become the new playground, workplace, or concert hall of the Generation. Everything and everyone is connected, exchanging information, collaborating, and performing tasks, which required days or months of serious organization in the past. People started “living” a second life of theirs, but in the Digital world, resembling a bit some of the scenes from the “Matrix” franchise by the Wachowski siblings.
Nowadays you can log in to an Online concert and enjoy Justin Bieber’s or The Weeknd’s digital concerts in the Metaverse with a VR set and a lot of Augmented reality.
Clearly, we now can create a digital copy of ourselves, which is very similar to our real-life physical personality. Some people even re-create their real selves in a digitized form willingly, exposing more information about themselves online, available for anybody to see.
But what happens when some of your personal data is used without your consent, for uncertain purposes?
Many have reported concerns that a lot of their confidential information has been breached and misused due to privacy issues or security difficulties. The truth is that a lot of popular platforms do use some of your personal information, and, sometimes, you have agreed to this, without even knowing about it.
How and what type of Data is being collected?
Let us quickly address the term “personal data”. It is a rather vague expression and this could cause some difficulties with its regulation and protection. The Internet might seem like a never-ending privacy-violating nightmare but don’t throw your smartphone out of the window yet. The most sensitive information stored online consists of banking details, social security numbers, and even health records, along with insurance accounts.
On the other hand, people willingly allow access to other personal data, such as social media posts, location data, and search-engine queries. This might not be as important as your credit card’s details but is used for different purposes by specific platforms, taking advantage of the knowledge they have about you.
A third outlined type of data collection is a bit difficult to believe, but it exists. Reportedly, it is said that there are companies that are analyzing specific behavior patterns we perform with our smartphones.
Your Email might be exposed
The collection of data and its usage happens on a wide spectrum of consent. It might occur knowingly, whereas sometimes users are not even aware of what they are agreeing to, primarily due to well-written terms of use that have hidden backdoors to your privacy.
That is as far as data collection goes. But what if we told you that some of your data, such as a personal or business email address, could be used without your consent at this very same moment while reading this blog post?
We have good news: we at pCloud have developed an amazing Free Online Data Breach Checker, to even further extend our robust security values and provide you with an extra note of protection.
You can now check whether your personal information has been exposed, by entering your email address in our Checker here.
This is what we hope you will receive after trying the Checker. If not, please make sure that your email is protected and consider using a Password Manager like pCloud Pass. When logging into specific services, it is always important to have a secure way of authentication, while getting the best protection for your credentials.
