It may not technically be spring yet, but a new year is always a good time to tidy up, especially when it comes to your digital life.
A recent case we worked on drove this home. We were trying to identify all the email addresses associated with a particular computer user. Along with the expected corporate account, we uncovered a slew of personal addresses: Gmail, Hotmail, Comcast. No surprises there.
But this machine had been around a while (still chugging along on Windows 7), and what really caught my eye were the long-forgotten providers; Earthlink, mail.com, even Yahoo. It made me think about my own old email accounts. I’ve had plenty over the years, including (if memory serves) a zdnetmail address. If you remember that, congratulations: you’ve officially been on the internet a long time!
What Happens to All Those Old Accounts?
It’s worth asking:
- What ever happened to the emails we left behind in those abandoned accounts?
- How many of those providers were breached before they implemented auto-deletion policies?
Today, many email services will close out your account if you don’t log in for a year or two. But when did they start doing this? And how many stale batches of emails from years ago were compromised, with someone, somewhere, still holding on to them?
A Reminder on Cyber Hygiene
I know we’ve talked about cyber hygiene here before, but this really underscores the point. It’s smart to keep your digital footprint lean:
Maybe one email for work, one for personal matters, and a third as a “burner” for discounts, random subscriptions, or sites you don’t fully trust.
Beyond that? It’s probably best to reduce your exposure.
Two Big Questions to Ask Yourself
- What passwords were you using on those old accounts?
- Even more importantly, did you use the same passwords anywhere else?
- And how confident are you that the provider had robust security measures back then?
- What was actually in those emails?
- Was there personal data, financial details, copies of ID, or sensitive communications?
Speaking for myself, the older I get, the less comfortable I am with leaving stray personal data floating around. Odds are, you probably feel the same.
It pays to know exactly how much of your personal information is out there, and to make sure it’s only what you actually need.
A little online housekeeping now can save a lot of headaches (or worse) down the road.