Today there is a Google (free) service to find out if your data ended up in a database (16 thousand stolen credentials) that run in the Dark Web.
Cybersiculia expert researchers discovered a huge database with 16 billion of stolen credentials. It is a booty that can open sensitive accounts such as Gmail, Apple or Facebook with IT criminals ready to exploit those flaws for scams, phishing or identity theft.
If this is bad news, there is also a good one: there is a free way to understand if your personal data has ended up in that submerged sea, i.e. the report on Google’s Dark Web. Available from last July, without the need for subscriptions, this tool makes only one simple thing: it analyzes if name, address, telephone and e-mail have been compromised during hacker attacks.
Free tool. The service, initially reserved for members of Google One, is now accessible to anyone without additional costs. It is found on the myactitivity.google.com website, in the “Results About You” section, a function launched in 2022 to allow users to discover and remove personal information from the search results. It takes several hours so that monitoring is concluded, but over time the platform has been updated with an automatic notification system that warns when any new sensitive data is identified, so as to minimize the risk of abuse.
In this way, Google aims to offer a more immediate level of protection, making the privacy defense integral part of one’s daily digital experience. Not surprisingly, the company has also joined this project Privacy Sandboxa set of technologies that balance security and advertising online, trying to protect users while keeping the economic model based on ads active.
How it works. The control is simple: just access “Results About You”, click on “Start” and enter full name, home address, e -mail and telephone number. You can try up to three variants for each field, so as to cover any differences in databases, such as an old cell phone number or a mail address no longer in use. In this regard, to strengthen users’ trust, Google underlines that the data entered are not stored or used for advertising profiling.
Once the search has started, the system flows the known databases of the violations and report any correspondences. The user can choose whether to receive notifications via email or app and, if unwanted results appear, can request their removal with a click from the menu next to each link.
Requests are evaluated manually, to make sure that there are no government or institutional sites and that information of public interest is not removed.
Growing protection. The expansion of the service represents a precise signal: technological companies are called to offer immediate defense tools against increasingly frequent threats. Google’s choice came shortly after the escape of an internal database that documented thousands of privacy accidents, which took place between 2013 and 2018, a demonstration of how vulnerable the giants of the web can also be.
Offering the public free control over the Dark Web means returning a margin of power to users, who today can no longer ignore the value of their personal data. Tools like this do not eliminate the risk, but they can help make the life of cyber criminals more difficult and more aware that of those who navigate online.
