This week the New York Times offered their readers a quiz which cross-references the major hacking incidents affecting public companies of the past two years with your own knowledge of your buying habits. The quiz allows readers to gauge the possibility of their private information having been hacked. The clever interface allows users to select companies to whom they’ve provided access credentials or credit card information, such as Target, AOL, Home Depot and Twitter, and cross references it with publicly known data breaches. It then cross-references your buying history with the known details of these respective incidents and provides a calculation of which aspects of your personal information may have been exposed, including the amount of times your address, birthday, credit card number, passwords, phone number, and other identifiable information have been revealed in these breaches. 

While many of the data breaches concern citizens of the United States, even a non-US resident could learn about the amount of times their information has been exposed. For example, if you signed up for a Twitter account before February 2013 or a customer account on the Adobe website before October 2013, your credit or debit card information and email address could have been exposed at least once, along with your respective passwords on each website.  

As the information is geared towards US residents, a US resident who has applied for a job with the US federal government since the year 2000, signed up for an eBay account before May 2014, bought health insurance from Anthem before January 2015, and used a credit card at Staples last summer, will potentially have had their address exposed 3 times, their birthday, email, and social insurance number exposed twice, along with their health history, passwords, phone number and even their fingerprints. 

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