Email Breach

I have multiple email addresses and one main one that they all forward to. It’s the first Gmail account I created using a nickname I gave to myself in high school. I use it for trying out new apps and sites that are anonymous in nature (not needing real names). I use an email address with my real name to communicate with other people.

I got an email tonight saying that my real name email was involved in a data breach. I felt disappointed, because it had been completely clean previously. (My main email has been involved in multiple breaches.) You can check yours at https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and sign up for alerts if any breaches are detected with your email.

I did not recognize the service that got breached. It turns out that I never used it directly, but another service I used did. This made me feel a little angry. It’s not like I signed up with this email on an insecure service. A service I used shared my email with the insecure service. I sent them an email asking what other data they shared with them. Due to the nature of the service, it should just be an email and name, and nothing with credit card numbers or passwords, which were other kinds of data involved in the breach.