Do you know where is your data stored, and how is it protected?

You most likely do not, and it is an arduous task to find out. A majority of the websites you visit require at least some amount of your personal information such as your name, date of birth and e-mail address. Subscription services such as Netflix or Amazon require not just that, but also your address, phone number, and payment details, while social media do not ask for your payment details, but they have your photos, location, who are your friends, personal messages, and where and how did you spend your last summer holidays. Some companies are also known to resell your data to third-party companies for research and marketing purposes. With this amount of data online your digital life is constantly at risk of security breaches.

If this has not persuaded you to take personal responsibility for your data and do your best to protect them, we have one more fact up our sleeve. A website called Breach Level Index provides a scary statistic of records stolen in data breaches since 2013. Every day over 6 million records are stolen, and only 4% of these records are protected by encryption making them useless to the perpetrators.

The biggest data breach so far was of gargantuan proportions — Yahoo reported all of their 3 billion user accounts to be compromised in the period between the years of 2013 and 2014. This breach exposed user accounts with full access to their personal information, passwords, and security questions and answers. A group of strangers, somewhere in the world had access to personal information, emails and other data of over 3 billion users, and that could turn even the sanest person into an overly paranoid creature.

Be in charge and protect your privacy — it is your human right.

Research company Gartner reported that just in 2018 alone, businesses spent over $114 billion worldwide for security services and products. Even with this colossal spending, the vulnerabilities of digital services and platforms remain at high risk of data breaches, and 2018 brought several of them. The Adhaar breach exposed over 1 billion user accounts, followed by the second largest breach of 2018 where over 500 million Starwood-Marriot clients lost their digital privacy.

“By encrypting your data using a hardware device like Trezor, you can be sure this information stays private unless you explicitly share the decryption key with another party. “

Pavol “Stick” Rusnak, Co-Founder and CTO at Trezor

Every business values the privacy of their customers, but sometimes it might not be enough. So what is the best way to protect your privacy and digital identity? Find out more and learn the best practices with our upcoming Trezor Data Privacy series, where we discuss the best practices to stay safe online, worst habits that make your data vulnerable, and how Trezor can help you keep your digital identity protected.