• Shivam Maurya
• February 23, 2024
• No Comments

Data breaches seem to be happening more and more frequently these days. Massive amounts of personal information is being exposed by hackers, putting millions of people’s privacy and identities at risk. But just how bad is the problem? It can be hard to comprehend. So, I decided to take a visual look at some of the recent major data breaches to fully grasp their scale and severity.

The giant televised face of Marriott stared grimly down at the ant-like crowd. On his forehead was 1 Starwood guest reservation database, containing 500 million guest records. This immense rectangle dwarfed the tiny, terrified stick figures below, representing the millions of exposed guests whose names, addresses, passport numbers and more were stolen. 

Another looming rectangle showed 1 Yahoo account database with 3 billion accounts breached. This unfathomable number of exposed accounts is over 3 times the population of the entire world! The array of personal information taken includes names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birthdates and security questions.

Next was the large, dark square labelled 1 Adult Friend Finder database with 412 million accounts exposed. This dump includes emails, passwords, usernames, addresses and sensitive sexual preference data enough to blackmail almost 1 out of every 2 Indians.

These massive shapes cast shadows over the crowd of helpless victims, emphasising the sheer volume of exposures and why data privacy has become such an important issue today. Though abstract, this visual really shows how current data breaches have violated incredible numbers of people in extremely invasive ways. Let’s fight for more stringent protections of user data going forward!