The internet isn't becoming a dangerous place to be; it is already a dangerous place to be.
I have a new appreciation of sites that allow you to log in using Apple login thanks to a letter I received from a doctor's office Saturday. The letter reported a data breach at their office, which exposed everything needed to steal your identification and offering a year of free ID protection including scanning the dark web as compensation. Since the service was free, I signed up, and a few hours later received my first report and it was an eye-opener! 😳
The report revealed, my identity has been exposed one to three times each year since 2013 by data breaches at companies I do business with via the internet. 🤬 The recommended safety measure in each data breach is changing the password for every account that uses that email address as a login ID even if they all use different passwords. As a matter of routine security, I do refresh passwords on the most vulnerable accounts periodically and I no longer re-use a password. Still, I have close to a hundred logins that use the same email address as the ID and changing all of those every time there is a data breach somewhere just isn't going to happen.
Although, to the best of my knowledge, I have not been directly targeted yet, it was at this point, I realized the benefit of logging in everywhere with Apple. Apple login provides multiple layers of hiding and protection and in the end the site receives a one-time, time-limited, password and hidden ID. A lot of sites offer Google or Facebook logon, but I haven't had a Facebook account in years, and I actively try to hide where I browse from Google so those won't do. For a while now, I have urged everyone to be cautious on the web. Effective today, I am urging the online sites I do business with to offer Apple logon.
