Data breach
Also called data leak, breach
When information a company holds about people, such as emails, passwords, addresses or chats, gets exposed or stolen.
Every account you've ever made is a copy of some of your details on someone else's servers, and some of those servers get breached. Have I Been Pwned, a free service that collects public breach data, lists well over 17 billion breached accounts.
Breaches matter more in the age of AI because they feed it. A list of names, emails and recent purchases used to become a crude mass email; with AI it becomes thousands of personal-sounding messages, each mentioning your town, your order or your employer.
AI services are also a new place for breaches. Chatbots hold some of the most personal writing people do, and they're run by companies that can make mistakes like any other: a DeepSeek database was found open to anyone, holding users' chats. Think about what you'd mind seeing leaked before you type it.
For example
A retailer you used years ago is hacked, and a week later you get a scam email that knows your address and what you bought.
Put it to use
Where you'll meet data breach in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, how to use it there, and the mix-up most people make.
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