October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, an annual campaign aimed at educating the public on digital privacy best practices and the importance of online safety. Sponsored by the U.S Department of Homeland Security and partners like the National Cybersecurity Alliance, the month-long initiative strives to build a more secure digital world and protect individuals from the risks associated with their personal information falling into the hands of bad actors.
This year, Cloaked is joining the initiative to support educating individuals on how sharing their personal information online can impact their friends, family, and loved ones. Most people don’t know how their personal choices can have lasting effects on those in their network and communities, but that changes now. Read on to learn more.
Learn How Your Actions Impact Loved Ones
When you opt in to sharing your personal information with a business – whether it is your phone number as backup for social media log in, email address for retail purchases, home address for coupons to your local grocery store, location data for “Find My” to track friends, etc. – you are not just exposing yourself, you are opening a door to data about your loved ones. Contact lists, location history, and even financial connections can be linked back to the people closest to you.
Take, for example, a reused password. You might think this is a convenient way for you to keep track of one of the dozens of log-ins you use regularly, but that reused password might give hackers access to a family cloud storage or other shared accounts, like streaming services, financial institutions, school logins and more. That family cloud account might hold sensitive information about your child, including copies of the birth certificate or documents containing their SSN, allowing hackers to target your child for identity theft, which may not be realized until years later when your child applies for a credit card or a loan for their first car.
Or, you blindly accept the terms of a new app you just downloaded without reading the privacy policy. Without realizing it, you just gave the app creators access to your contact list, meaning hundreds of names and phone numbers that you thought lived in your phone are now open to sale to data brokers, eventually ending up in the public domain.
In the digital world, your footprint is rarely yours alone and can have unintended consequences, directly affecting the privacy and security of those around you, including children, aging parents, and more.
What To Do This Cybersecurity Awareness Month:
Understand Your Risk
It might seem overwhelming to figure out where to start, but it’s a lot simpler than you think. The very first thing is to understand what your digital footprint currently looks like.
Introducing HaveIBeenBreached, Cloaked’s newest tool, which scans the public domain for your email or phone number to see if your information has been included in a data breach. Chances are, it has. The widget then outlines exactly where and when your data became vulnerable, and assesses your risk for identity theft and/or fraud.
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Additionally, Cloaked has developed a Data Privacy hotline – 855.752.5625 – to educate individuals about sensitive, personal information like social security numbers and home addresses that can be found through public records.
If you are a content creator, upload Cloaked’s Privacy Scan widget as a resource to help others understand their data privacy risk.
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Educate Yourself
Check out this infographic and share with your family and friends.
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Keep these tips in mind:
- Opt Out of Data Sharing: Many data brokers are legally obligated to remove your data if requested. Use a data removal service to streamline the process of opting out from multiple brokers.
- Limit Permissions: Regularly review app and account settings to ensure you’re not sharing unnecessary data.
- Use Privacy Tools: Invest in tools like VPNs, password managers, and privacy-focused browsers. These can help anonymize your activity and protect sensitive information.
- Monitor Your Digital Footprint: Search for your name, email, and phone number online periodically to identify potential misuse.
- Check Your Credit: Enable credit monitoring and identity protection services to catch unauthorized activity.
Listen in – Secure Your World, Protect Their Future Webinar
Want to learn more? Join Cloaked Co-founder and CEO Arjun Bhatnagar as he hosts a webinar with Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Legislative Activist Rin Alajaji to discuss the threats, legislative activity, and data connectivity that impact your security and the safety of your most important connections.
When: Tuesday, October 14
Time: 1:30 PM EST
Link to register: https://luma.com/vh7vp0km
Know the Facts
A recent Cloaked survey of 720 new users revealed that Cloaked users are disproportionately motivated by real harm. Nearly half have experienced fraudulent charges and/or been hacked – with another 50% concerned about money or identity theft. These concerns are real when you look at the latest stats related to our data:
- Record data breaches: 3,158 data compromise cases in the U.S. in 2024; over 1.35 billion individuals were affected through breaches, leaks, or exposure incidents. Statista
- Identity/fraud reports remain large: There were more than 1.1 million identity theft reports in 2024, costing $12.5 billion in losses to Americans. Federal Trade Commission
- Older adults remain at risk: $1.9 billion lost by adults aged 60+ in 2023 due to fraud, though actual losses are most likely much higher. Federal Trade Commission
- Child identity theft is rising:
- Child identity theft surged ~40% between 2021 and 2024. LSEG
- 1.7 million U.S. children had personal info exposed in a data breach in one year (1 in every 43 children). Javelin
- Social media is a rising risk vector for child identity theft. Many child victims come from households with income over $100,000. Javelin
- DNA is susceptible: Genealogy breaches and law-enforcement tracing show that DNA uploads reveal you and your cousins, parents and children. The HIPAA Journal
