[junon]

> Sixteen billion is roughly double the amount of people on Earth today, signaling that impacted consumers may have had credentials for more than one account leaked

Interesting use as "may have" as that would imply, mathematically speaking, that there are people who were impacted at least twice...

[legacynl]

The subject of that sentence was consumers. Individual consumers 'may have' multiple credentials leaked

[krunck]

The list might also span a large time period and contain multiple versions of a user's credentials.

[AnotherGoodName]

A common dark web strategy is just to re-bundle old password leaks to sell to white hats looking to investigate such leaks. Which is an amusing scam and one of the problems with trusting anything on the dark web.

[SV_BubbleTime]

Also, dead people had passwords.

[9rx]

To be fair, we really have no idea how many people are on Earth today. Eight billion is our best estimate, but we also recognize that many of the sources used are undercounted to some degree. What's hard to determine to what degree that might be. A somewhat recent article in Popular Mechanics [https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a642223...] suggests that recent data may indicate that the estimates are way off... But who knows?

Granted, any discrepancy is probably not on the order of reaching 16 billion. An additional billion uncounted would be incredibly surprising. But also, the accounts don't necessarily equate to people still on this earth and maybe don't equate to people at all. Robots have been known to create accounts too.

[yzydserd]

A co-author of the study you refer to was recently on the UK BBC podcast More or Less, debunking much of the press coverage of his study, specifically the headline of vast global underestimation. Rather, the study found rural distribution estimates may be inaccurate, not total population.

Link to the 9 minute episode https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0lgv5vf