Nowadays there are data breaches on a daily basis. It has become the norm to see on the news that companies have been hacked. But some data breaches are worse than others!

We have recently been reviewing all company and personal emails through websites such as Have I Been Pwned. This website incorporates a massive amount of breached and leaks and let you check if your email has been pwned.

One specific breach caught our attention: People Data Labs (PDL)

People Data Labs

By looking at it's website they mention they have accumulated over 2.5 billion profiles from unique individuals.

Here is a partial sample of available fields when using their API:

• Full name
• First name
• Middle name
• Last name
• Gender
• Birth year
• Birth date
• LinkedIn url & username
• Facebook url & username
• Twitter url & username
• GitHub url & username
• Work email

This is just a small subset of the data collected on individuals by PDL.

Protecting your privacy

If you find yourself in the PDL breach we would recommend that you ask you data to be deleted by PDL. With current Data Privacy laws they had to make an easy to use opt-out form.

The form is available here: https://www.peopledatalabs.com/opt-out-form

HOWEVER BE WARY the phone number field is not mandatory and you don't have to fill it in to opt-out. The less data your share the better it always is.

On a side note if you see your email on Have I Been Pwned as part of other data breaches we would recommend to update all your passwords.

About Us

Pixium Digital is an agile software development company with their headquarters located in Singapore. We focus on shaping our clients project from ideas to successful project launch.

Cyber Security is a big part of any project we have to deliver. Very often we have been the witness of lack of awareness or caution from various providers or clients we have worked with. We aim to share those little tips to the community so that with everyone's effort, we can make the web a safer place.