What the Ashley Madison data breach teaches us about temporary email addresses.

Unless you are going absolutely old school with your communication, the concept of an email address is quite basic today.  You have to link the ID with essential bank data, personal communications, public communications and even social media platforms.  It is obvious that a breach in confidentiality in any one of the links of this critical communication network can have your email address and virtually your entire personal information at a risk for exposure.  The recent data breach at Ashley Madison is a glaring example of just such an occurrence of a vital security breach of sensitive digital data that disrupted thousands of lives.

Ashley Madison Data breach

Ashley Madison was a famous social website that targeted users who were mostly married men looking to have a discreet affair.  The hacker that attacked the site declared the breach on basic morality grounds.  Apart from the intent of publicly shaming established men having illicit affairs online, the main motive for the breach was to lay bare the unscrupulous business practices of the core group managing the popular website. Yet, this occurrence continues to happen for different types of websites with no morality breach or wrongful business dealings.  The incident with the Ashley Madison website hack just made it glaringly clear of the vulnerability of email address exposure online and the risks associated to security breach in such scenarios.

An effective counter measure for this potential risk is to own temporary email addresses to conduct your digital network transactions.

3 benefits of transacting with disposable email IDs:

* You can use the disposable ID to register for new websites to analyze the level of disruptive behavior that follows a sign up.  Check for the validity of their email marketing campaign and only continue with sites that do not waste your time with junk and spam mails.

* You can use disposable email IDs to register for reward points or potential offers from e-commerce websites but you can easily avoid the usual marketing email campaigns that follow such registrations.

* Leaking of your personal email ID can lead to digital fraud, identity theft and even direct digital theft scenarios.  Instead, using disposable emails let you transact on a multiple websites without ever putting your original email information at risk.

Personal email IDs is critical information that are actually a valued sale commodity on the open web.  Once leaked, the personal email ID could mark you up as a high potential target for hackers and scam artists.  Always use a strategy of multiple disposable IDs to protect the way that digital companies are allowed to use your email information.