In 2019, my SSN was used to purchase 4 iPhones, open 2 credit cards, and used to buy perfume in another state.
In 2026, almost mainstream messaging app monitors your private messages (yes, even Whatsapp now [0]).
Society decided that to be in it, you must give up your privacy along time ago.
[0] - https://engineering.fb.com/2026/08/12/security/how-were-buil...
This is a stupid nihilistic take. Gmail hasn't been breached that many times. Your original credentials from the first breach were passed around from black market to other black market and were repackaged. They didn't get your newest password 39 different times. The black markets are a lot like middle quality data brokers -- they don't actually care if their data is the most accurate or up-to-date.
If your credit profile was completely hovered, that's another story. Credit bureaus are simply a knowledge database and are a massive liability. But my credit hasn't been similarly destroyed so there is likely another major variable between our risk profiles. Maybe your physical mailbox has been breached multiple times.
Security hygiene is a lot like physical hygiene. You just need a few rules and you are mostly good. Don't sleep around too much, choose your partners wisely, and use protection when you do find a new partner until you both trust each other enough.
As it pertains to Meta, nobody should trust this company after what they did with iOS contacts on the original Facebook app.
And nobody needs to use Muse. You aren't opting out of society on a Unabomber level if you choose not to use this one AI agent app by a less than trustworthy company.
According to haveibeenpwnd, my gmail address (which I too have had since invite-only) has been in 1 data breach. My Mac.com address which I've had since it was called iTools, 19 breaches. I've had to rotate my email account passwords I think 3 or 4 times over the last 20 years, and rotate most external accounts that use those email addresses a few times. I'm not sure what this proves other than "you should randomly generate your passwords & rotate them" which is what mainstream users have been doing for at least a few years now. Apple also notifies me if any password I use has been in a breach, and gives an easy link to rotate it.
SSN fraud predates the Internet and has little to do with online consumer services privacy (most don't have your SSN). When I was a young teenage cracker anarchist in the late 80s & early 90s, we got credit cards & SSN's through hacking the credit agencies, credit card companies, credit unions and regional banks (all of whom often had insecure dialup endpoints, or even better, insecure X.25 network endpoints), and through a BBS community that would disseminate these data breaches. Same as it ever was.
Mainstream end to end encrypted apps do not monitor your private messages. Cynicism is not wisdom. WhatsApp offering an on-app opt-in model to detect scans seems like a well thought through feature, though Meta's reputation is not good on this topic.
Clearly many do not care about privacy. But it is quite possible to be very online and have reasonable privacy. It requires discernment and discipline.
No matter how much discernment and discipline about my privacy, I can’t protect myself from someone else’s lack of discipline and discernment about my privacy, especially for mandatory critical systems.
Why put in all this time to protect to my privacy when UpGuard, National public Data, etc will leak my SSN anyways?
Look at the Equifax breach - most of the US SSN's, addresses, & more released, and they get a little slap on the wrist and continue doing business. I was in there, I never signed up for equifax, I signed up for companies that signed up with equifax.
That said, it is still a slippery slope argument, just because there will be more data breaches, doesn't mean we should give everything out freely and just give up.