Hi Pals,
Today, I ran through all emails of my contacts on haveibeenpwned.com. My cousin’s account was online for sale. It turns out that Paytm was breached last year. I live in joint family. Our home address, Phone numbers, Names, and his whole payment history is published online because of his bad habits. I don’t blame him.
Some practices I want you all to follow:
Use Password Manager, this is most important part.
Don’t use UPI, or atleast use GooglePay only. All other companies have bad practices, trust me. Look yourself about Phonepe and Paytm.
Set payment as cash when using any online services on your Phone like Uber, Ola, Rapido, etc. I do this all the time.
Email Aliases should be self explanatory.
Phone numbers are bad here, but don’t lose hope anon. I looked into DoosraApp : doosra.com. Pay for the service and use it only for signing up for online services. Changing your SIM is only option, I have tried a lot, companies don’t want to delete your phone number.
Well your advice is applicable regardless of nationality…
I am guessing these are payment processors. Everyone should use cash as often as they permit. With the world becoming more reliant on weird financial technologies the options for true privacy gets smaller. I’d sooner trust a proper bank with these rather than corporations that purely exist only on cellphones. You dont really have much options.
If an anonymous prepaid sim card options are is still a thing on India (or anywhere for that matter), you should get those and maybe swap only to those as necessary.
One thing you can be sure is that Google actually has proper security engineers. Honestly I don’t see the point in using smaller payment processors, it’s risk.
And often they won’t if it’s used for verification purposes. Also keep in mind using some anonymous number services will trigger fraud detection systems.