Danny Palmer<p>These days, as I adapt to 'freelance' life, I find I'm having to give out what was previously my personal email out a lot more often. It's not an embarrassing email address - I did stop using my gaming handle as a primary email at about 17 - but it does contain my year of birth. In my defence, I set the email account up about 20 years ago, when it's safe to say <a href="https://infosec.exchange/tags/cybersecurity" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>cybersecurity</span></a> wasn't my top priority.</p><p>While this hasn't come back to bite me (yet...) it has me thinking about this piece from a couple of years ago when I tasked Jack Chapman with finding out all he could about me using publicly available data - including data from the vast amount of data breaches I've been caught up in over the years.</p><p>Long story short, my email addresses, passwords, IP addresses and more were, if you looked in the right places, there for nefarious types to find and exploit. </p><p>And as the internet never forgets, remember that gaming handle? That's tied to a forum username and on that forum you can see photos of me at a pub get together of forum users in about 2006. </p><p>While that's not necessarily a danger to my privacy (well, unless someone AI deepfakes those photos...) well, it's definitely a little bit cringe to see gawky teenage photos of me are there on the internet - and worrying to know they can never be deleted. 😳 </p><p>And if you want that email address to task me with writing something be it freelance, contract or something more permanent? Well, you can ask me - or, I suppose, try and find it in a data breach...</p><p>(Also, I'm in the process of setting up a "business" email address - because I'm finding now I don't have a work email address, many cyber firms won't let me download research papers and the like with a general Gmail account!)</p><p><a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-security-researcher-told-me-my-passwords-and-more-how-15-years-of-digital-footprints-left-me-exposed/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">zdnet.com/article/a-security-r</span><span class="invisible">esearcher-told-me-my-passwords-and-more-how-15-years-of-digital-footprints-left-me-exposed/</span></a></p>