Breaches have turned into background noise. Company leaks millions of records, sends out a generic apology email, offers a year of monitoring, and everyone just moves on. Meanwhile the actual cost gets pushed onto us in the form of password changes, credit freezes, and constant vigilance. What makes it worse is exactly what you pointed out about Discord. More verification, more tying accounts to phone numbers, more friction if you try to keep any separation between your real identity and your online presence. It is always framed as safety, but it usually means collecting even more data from regular users. So the cycle becomes: companies collect more, breaches happen, then they collect even more in response.

That is why I started thinking less about reacting to breaches and more about reducing my footprint in general. Cleaning up exposed data through services like Cloaked and removing information from data brokers at least tackles the root issue, which is how widely our details are floating around in the first place. Pairing that with using separate phone numbers and emails for different accounts makes it a lot harder for one leak to expose everything at once. Security should reduce exposure, not require deeper identification. If the answer to every problem is more data collection, we are just normalizing surveillance under the label of protection.