Do you get too many spam calls? Fake emails? Extended car warranty mail? Your data could be being sold to different data brokerages. One of the biggest challenges in this day and age is protecting YOUR data. With all the platforms and apps that ask you to share your location/birthday/etc just to use the service can be ridiculous. Data privacy is a practice that everyone should be aware of. SecureFrame says, “The global average would have been lower if not for the 9% cost surge in the United States remains the most expensive place for a breach, with costs surging to an all-time high of $10.22 million per incident in 2025”(SecureFrame).
Protecting your data can be as easy as not clicking “accept” on the terms of service, or “opting out” of certain newsletters. There are even services that will send emails/mail to request that your data be removed from their side. Signing in with Google could even be a culprit if you signed into an app 10 years ago and forgot about it. For the people who have used the same password since college, there’s a good chance it’s on the Dark Web somewhere. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything you can do with Darkweb data, but at least changing to a password manager or rotating passwords is important if you know it’s been compromised.