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.

  • 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.