Email: a valuable currency

Your email address is valuable for businesses competing for your attention. Email address are often the unique identifier for creating new accounts, and it’s standard practice for websites to ask for your email address for subscription to their newsletter mailouts.

Most people carry the same email address for a long period of time (especially personal accounts). It doesn’t take long before your email address is distributed to hundreds of different lists.

Peace of mind

An online tool called ‘have I been pwned?’ takes your email address and checks to see if your account has been compromised or hacked. The term ‘pwned’ originates from the gamers meaning you have been owned or completely dominated.

Once you enter your email address it checks for any existing issues as well as remembering any previous problems the account has been involved with.

e.g.

Larger companies typically announce security issues to keep transparent and they often act very quickly to manage and contain any damage. The example above shows both dropbox and linkedIN had issues in the past, however in both instances the only action required was to reset the passwords.

You can also request to get notified when your account has been hacked – sweet!