Data breaches can be pricy. When breaches occur, they expose data of millions of users while highlighting the flaws that exist in a data system thereby, causing industries to transform their entire data management system. And this transformation typically costs thousands of dollars in data encryption and protection. In 2018, IBM presented a report that an average data breach costs around US $3.86 million (after studying ancillary costs of losing customers and overhauling of the system)

A complicated factor that is involved in data breaches is that it is unlike any theft. The problem is that data breaches are not realized until two or three months after data breeches have been conducted and the news is exposed to the public. This delay is also the major reason why the magnitudes of data breaches are massive.

The purpose that revolves around data breaches is to gather as much personal information possible so that data mining companies are able collect and sell data of individuals to companies like but not limited to advertising companies and campaign management associations. These marketing associations then process the data and categorize people into different pre-set categories, that their customers use to sell a said propaganda and/or a product.

In 2016, Yahoo reported that a data breech that occurred between 2013-14, data of over 3 billion users was mined by ‘a state-sponsored entity’. The data breeched mainly involved names, email IDs and date of birth of Yahoo’s users. Though the culprits were never really found out, the impact of this data breech was immense. Yahoo was put out-of-business for almost 2 weeks, until the investigations were deemed over. In fact, when the leaks were declared to the media, Yahoo was discussing the sale of its majority shares with Verizon. The leaks, resulted in a $350 million kickback to the deal, causing shares to be sold at US $4.48 Billion.

The funny thing about Data breeches is that they cannot be predicted and worked for, with respect to its intensity, in advance. Companies like Yahoo, Facebook and Google invest millions of dollars in erecting a data protection network, and still encounter faults in them on a regular basis. This makes us question, how safe is our data with those companies that are new-born internet-based blog sites and start-ups? How safe is our data with places where we, on a daily basis, voice out our views and opinions?