Digital footprint check

Your digital footprint is the trail of data you have left online: the accounts you created, the services holding your email address, the subscriptions billing your card, and the personal details sitting in company databases. A footprint check is the diagnostic pass over that trail. It answers three questions in order.

1. What am I signed up to? The full list, including the accounts you have forgotten about.
2. What has been exposed? Which of those accounts have appeared in known data breaches, and what was leaked.
3. What should I do about it? Which accounts to close, which passwords to change, and which logins to lock down.

The point is not paranoia. It is a current picture of where your data lives, so you can shrink your exposure deliberately rather than reacting to whatever turns up in the news.

The slow part of any footprint check is discovery. Finding accounts by hand means digging through years of email one search at a time, and the accounts you most want to find are precisely the ones you have stopped thinking about. Tools that connect to your inbox automate that one step.

In The Event Of connects to a supported inbox, Gmail or Outlook, and reads account-related metadata, sender addresses, subject lines, labels and timestamps, rather than the body of your emails. From that it reconstructs the list of services tied to your address, connects with 100 + services, and maps them into a single view alongside baseline breach checks. Sensitive values such as your connected-inbox OAuth tokens are encrypted with AES-256-GCM at the application level, on top of encryption at rest.

Discovery, the footprint map, guided checklists, progress tracking and baseline breach checks with essential alerts are included on the free tier at A$0. Protection, at A$10 a month or A$99 a year with a 14-day free trial on the monthly plan, adds multiple email addresses, deeper breach detail, priority alerts, richer remediation guidance and continuous monitoring. If you would rather not connect anything at all, skip to the manual method below.

You can do all of this yourself. It takes longer and it will not catch everything, but it costs nothing and it teaches you a great deal about where your data has spread. Work through the steps in order and keep a running list as you go.

1. 1

   Search your own name in a private window

   Open a private or incognito window so your own history and logins do not skew the results, then search your name. Try variations: your name in quotation marks, your name plus your city, your name plus an employer or an old username. This is the layer strangers can see. Note anything surprising, such as old profiles, directory listings or forum posts.
2. 2

   Search each email address in quotation marks

   In the same window, search each address you have used, wrapped in quotation marks, to force an exact match. This surfaces public mentions, pasted lists and profiles tied directly to the address. Repeat for older and secondary addresses, which are usually the ones with the longest tail of forgotten signups.
3. 3

   Mine your inbox for signups and receipts

   Search your inbox for the phrases that signup emails almost always contain: “welcome to”, “verify your email”, “confirm your subscription”, “your order”, “receipt” and “free trial”. Most results are live accounts. Our guide on how to find accounts linked to your email goes deeper on the search operators, and accounts linked to your phone number covers the same job for your mobile.
4. 4

   Read your saved logins

   Open your password manager, or your browser's saved password settings, and read the whole list. This is often the fastest single view of every site you have created a login for, and it doubles as a to-do list. While you are there, review the third-party apps connected to your Google or Microsoft account and revoke anything you no longer use.
5. 5

   Check each address for breach exposure

   Enter each address into a reputable breach-checking service and note which incidents it appears in and what was exposed. See our guide to Have I Been Pwned for how to read the results, the alternatives worth running alongside it, and how to run a data breach check for why different services return different answers.

A list is only useful if you work through it. Take it in priority order rather than alphabetically, because the risk is very unevenly distributed.

• Close what you no longer use.Every dormant account is data you no longer watch and a login that can be breached without you noticing. Look for “delete account” or “close account” in each service's settings, or see how to delete old accounts.
• Fix reused and weak passwords first. If one password protects several accounts, a single breach unlocks all of them. Prioritise any password that is reused or that sits on an account you found in a breach, and turn on multi-factor authentication wherever it is offered.
• Lock down the accounts that unlock others. Your primary email, your banking and payment logins, and anything that can reset your other passwords are worth far more than the rest. Give them unique passwords, strong multi-factor authentication and current recovery details.
• Deal with anything already exposed. If an address turned up in a breach, follow what to do if your email is in a data breach and, for the mailbox itself, how to secure your email after a data breach.

Treat this as maintenance rather than a one-off project. Once or twice a year is a reasonable baseline, and it is worth an extra pass whenever your circumstances change, because life events are when new accounts appear and old details go stale.

• After a breach in the news at a service you actually use, rather than after every breach in the news.
• When you change your phone number, your card, or your primary email address.
• When you move house, in which case the address-change checklist covers who needs telling.
• When you change jobs and lose access to a work email that was attached to personal accounts.

If you want to understand what these tools do and do not cover before you commit to one, compare a password manager, a breach monitor and a digital footprint manager, or read our roundup of digital footprint management tools in Australia.

In The Event Of exists to collapse the discovery step. You connect a supported inbox, Gmail or Outlook, and it scans for account-related metadata, sender addresses, subject lines, labels and timestamps, rather than the body of your emails. You can also add services manually. It turns what it finds into a footprint map, runs baseline breach checks, and gives you guided checklists and progress tracking so the list becomes a set of decisions rather than a spreadsheet.

The free tier costs A$0 and covers discovery, the footprint map, guided checklists for life and admin changes, progress tracking, and baseline breach checks with essential alerts. Protection, at A$10 a month or A$99 a year with a 14-day free trial on the monthly plan, adds multiple email addresses, deeper breach detail, priority alerts, richer remediation guidance and continuous monitoring. Every change to an account is still yours to make, we surface it and walk you through it.