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The basic stuff helps a decent amount. Assume your name, phone, email, address are all public. Don't reuse passwords, ever (use a password manager), use 2fa wherever possible, ideally not the SMS kind. Use a password manager that has a tie-in with haveibeenpwned or whatever so you know asap to change your creds. Some extras: use unique email addresses per site if you can. Some setups allow infinite aliases. Then you can blackhole one that gets leaked, and you can know where it got leaked from. If you can, have a separate setup (completely separate email account(s), not just aliases, and even separate hardware to access them if you can) for very important accounts, the ones that would ~ruin your life for a good bit if they got taken over (bank, retirement, etc.) There's also credit monitoring type stuff, which I've never been clear how useful it is, but might be worthwhile. You also may get it free if some company you use has a leak and they try to PR it away that way. I think there's some way to basically lock your credit against new accounts, I need to look into that someday, don't know the details or if it even exists. |
Someone on HN will invariably point out that this is how it was for the last hundred years, and it was only when we made computers powerful enough to abuse the information that this level of privacy became a concern.
I remember the days when your name, address, and phone number were public information. I paid something like $15/month to keep it out of the phone book.
What I recently learned, browsing through old books that a local library was throwing away, is that sometimes those phone book listings would also include things like a woman's maiden name, and the name of her husband, and/or marital status. Something like:
That part was new to me.