Using Your Real Email to Sign In? Your Privacy Is at Risk, but websites should stop using E-mail as a Login ID anyway
Many people use their primary email to sign in to practically everything. That’s a privacy nightmare, and you might be shocked to see how easily someone can use it to effectively stalk you and violate your privacy, and also track you right across the Internet.
Even with the new passkeys logins, it seems like we’ll still have an ID to be identified by. There are still some sites (generally older ones) where you can choose any ID or username to have as a login. That makes it much more difficult for anyone to hack your credentials, as they must guess both the correct ID and matching password.
I think the reason that e-mails became the default user ID is because website designers as well as users just got lazy. It’s probably the same reason why so many people use the same password too across all their sites, and which is why passkeys are coming out as the only way to actually break that habit. We don’t want to be tracked or hacked, but we don’t want any extra effort either…
The end of the linked article does give some suggestions though around using e-mail aliases. But a word of caution, be careful of using say just the Apple service as then you are tied into the Apple service. Either ways you may get tied into the alias service, so give that choice some thought (unless you are aiming for just disposal e-mail addresses, as then that is not a problem).
See https://www.howtogeek.com/872828/using-your-real-email-to-sign-in-your-privacy-is-at-risk/
#technology #privacy #logins #email
source https://gadgeteer.co.za/using-your-real-email-to-sign-in-your-privacy-is-at-risk-but-websites-should-stop-using-e-mail-as-a-login-id-anyway/
Comments