What Google’s Free Dark Web Report Will Soon Reveal About You

Google is making its Dark Web report available to hundreds of millions of users with a free Google account. That means you’ll soon know where your personal data has been leaked online.

Until now, Google’s Dark Web report was only available to customers who had purchased a Google One account. Starting later this month, however, Google will make the service available to anyone with a Google account, whether paid or not.

This means that hundreds of millions of people will now receive a warning when their email address, date of birth, passwords and other sensitive data have been exposed in a data breach.

Here’s the type of information the report might reveal about you.

How Google Dark Web Report Works

To find out if your information was part of a data breach, you first need to create what Google calls a monitoring profile.

By default, this information includes your name, date of birth, and Gmail address. Google also allows you to add other information to your monitoring profile, including your mailing address, additional email addresses, and phone numbers.

Once this information is entered, Google searches for matches in data that has been published on the dark web following data breaches.

You receive an instant summary of the number of data breaches your data has been included in and the type of information that was disclosed, as detailed below.

You can click on each of these categories to find out which specific leaks contained your personal information.

For example, the screenshot below shows a summary of the information that was captured about me as part of the MGM data breach that was disclosed last year.

This information is not necessarily accurate or up-to-date, which is why Google hides some details.

How to Use Google Dark Web Report

In reality, there’s not much you can do if Google’s Dark Web report reveals that information like your home address or date of birth was leaked in an attack. It would be pretty extreme to move just because your address was leaked, and it’s not like you can change your date of birth.

You can change your email address. Some privacy-conscious people change their email addresses regularly to improve security and reduce spam. However, since many online accounts are tied to an email address, it would involve at least some degree of administration when updating accounts with your new address.

It may be a good idea to use a portable webmail account to sign up for everyday web services that require an email address, and then use a more permanent address (perhaps tied to a domain you own) for more sensitive accounts, such as online banking and government websites.

The most important thing is to pay attention to passwords and take immediate action. If the Google Dark Web report reveals that your password has been compromised in an attack, you can click on it to see exactly which password was leaked. Google will only reveal a few characters of each leaked password for security reasons, but that should be enough to confirm whether it’s a password you use regularly or (worse) on multiple sites.

Make sure to change any hacked passwords immediately. I highly recommend using a password manager like the free Bitwarden to make sure you have strong, unique passwords on every site you sign up for, so that if a password is leaked from one site, the damage is limited.

How to get Google Dark Web report

Google’s support page states that the Dark Web report “will be available to all users with a consumer Google Account” starting in late July.

It’s not yet clear where this will appear, but the security section of your My Account page on Google would be a good place to start looking.