IdentityShld publishes plain-English guides on data breaches, identity protection, and online privacy. The premise behind every page is the same: most people do not need more fear about their data. They need to know what is actually exposed, what actually matters, and what to actually do, in that order.
How the guides get made
Our guides are written and maintained by a small independent team, published under a collective byline, and each one carries the date it was last reviewed. We check breach-related claims against Have I Been Pwned's public breach data, the same dataset our scan tool is built on, and we check recovery and credit guidance against official sources such as the FTC's IdentityTheft.gov and the credit bureaus' own published processes. When something is our judgment rather than an established fact, the wording says so.
We keep a standing rule about numbers: if we cannot trace a statistic to a source we would name to your face, it does not go in the guide. Security writing is full of recycled scare figures, and we would rather publish a plainer sentence than an impressive one we cannot back.
What we refuse to do
Some of what builds trust is just naming what you will not do, so, in writing:
- No scare tactics. We will tell you when something is dangerous and when it is not. A guide that frightens you into a purchase is a sales letter in disguise.
- No fake urgency. Nothing on this site expires at midnight.
- No pay-to-play recommendations. No company pays to be featured, ranked, or recommended in a guide, and no company sees a guide before you do.
- No pretending to be what we are not. We are an informational website, not a credit bureau, a law firm, or a government agency, and our guides say so whenever the distinction matters.
How this site makes money, exactly
Transparency about money is the whole reason this page exists, so here it is without varnish.
The free breach scan linked across this site, at identitybreachscan.com, is our own tool, run by the same team. The scan is free. It offers a paid personal breach report, and that report is the main way this project pays for itself.
Separately, some links on this site or in the report may be affiliate links to partner services, which means we may earn a commission if you sign up, at no extra cost to you. Commissions never decide what we write, which is a claim you can test: our guide on identity theft protection services spends most of its length explaining who should not buy one, and our guides consistently point out that the strongest protections, like credit freezes, are free.
Contact
Questions, corrections, or partnership inquiries: [email protected]. A real person reads it and replies.
Where to start
If you are new here, start with how to check if your email was in a breach, or just browse all guides. Each guide ends with the logical next one.