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When it comes tocybersecurity, most people think that creating strong, unique passwords is enough.
But your email address is actually more valuable than your passwords.
It’s basically your digital passport.
If it falls into the wrong hands, the stakes are extremely high.
In 2024, the global average cost of a business data breach was $4.88 million.
Product and Engineering Lead at Proton Pass.
By themselves, individual accounts contain some sensitive information about you, but your email address connects them all.
In the hands of a bad actor, it’s the key to a gold mine of personal data.
What happens when your email address your digital passport is exposed?
If your email address is published online, you become a target for bad actors online.
The two main ways that this can happen are through data breaches and data brokers.
Hackers downloaded and published troves of information, with more than 1 billion records being stolen.
Your email address can also be uncovered by data brokers.
Data brokers trade in personal information as a commodity, selling it for marketing and advertising purposes.
They combine data points such as your internet history, public records, and purchases.
If you’re affected, you’ll likely find your inbox bombarded with spam from marketers and potentially scammers.
Even governments can purchase this data to spy on their citizens using warrantless surveillance.
Anyone can fall victim to data scraping and breaches.
Proton’s recent study looked into politicians that had fallen victim to data breaches.
But that’s not realistic.
So the best way to protect your real identity is to hide your digital identity.
Email aliases let you hide youridentityfrom online services.
Despite being easy to create and manage, they’re still underutilized.
Without any identifying information, such as your name, it can’t be traced back to you.
Even if that business is breached, your personal identity won’t be affected.
you might create a unique alias for each account, covering your tracks online and protecting yourprivacy.
Without your email address, data brokers and scammers can’t create an online profile for you.
The inconvenience and risk associated with your real email address being leaked is eliminated.
Instead of a huge task to reset your email address, it becomes a thirty second fix.
Email aliases don’t just allow you to receive emails but send them too.
Email aliases are an easy, low-effort tool to combat cybercrime and protect our personal data.
We’ve featured the best secure email provider.
