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Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

if i had the amount of money to throw around, i would love to encourage people like these making such disclosures.

hear me out. the public perception of hacking is "if its money then all police resources are behind you if you are lucky. if not then bad luck, police has more important work to do".

more of these hacks will happen, aadhar DB will be made public and websites will leak data. the public will learn the hard way that internet security is important as much as protecting your physical passport

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This has been going on for more than 10 years, fairly frequently, and at increasing scale, and the public still hasn't learned. It requires something with severe impact for very many people (like hacking an entire bank or government) before the awareness will set in, I'm afraid. And even then I'm not convinced it'll happen and stick. Think climate change.

The public is utterly unable to effect any meaningful improvements that would reduce the occurence of this happening.

They can generate enough noise for politicians to start paying attention, though. The EU makes small steps from time to time. Enforcing laws remains a problem, though.

Ever heard or Equifax? After that beach I'm pretty confident the public will never care.

What can a regular user do to save their data from a breach like this? Aside from having strong unique passwords and changing as soon as they learn of a breach.

Seems like its all on the provider's side.

Only half-way realistic solution is to always provide false data about yourself unless there's a particular reason why they need your real address (such as delivering something). I guess that also requires reducing the amount of different sites you order from, or even preferentially turn to brick and mortar. If a site requires a CC for payment, you might get away with a false address if they don't verify it against the card. Otherwise you're going to have to avoid sites that don't allow you to use PayPal or more anonymous forms of payment.

When I was traveling with Renfe in Spain, they required the following information about me in order for me to be able to buy a ticket:

- Full name

- Phone number

- Passport number

Was it always like this in Spain, or did they introduce this after the train bombings in Madrid in 2004? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Madrid_train_bombings

Either way, it felt strange and unusual for me. In my country we can pay in cash and not enter any personal details unless we want to. In Spain, taking the train with Renfe is like taking an airplane to another country. They even have security gateways at the train station like the airports do.

india has a police station in every train station because it is considered "critical infra".... same for delhi metro (same would be probably true for all metro in India) which is guarded by CISF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Industrial_Security_Fo...

you need the same details as you mentioned to travel by trains in india but metro travel is still a cash only thankfully

buy the exclsuive copy of the data, or possibly pay the leakers to omit your information from sales

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