It's worth noting that often, the email can be correlated with other breaches to get your real name. People can do that relatively easily on osint websites. I wasn't terribly pleased when I found my teenage furaffinity account show up in an identity theft monitoring app. Other people have turned up in breaches of far more objectionable websites.
If your email provider offers email aliases, you should really get familiar with how to use them, and use a unique email alias per website.
At this point it’s all public. Everything you do on the internet is or will be public.
I was also in the furaffinity leak lol. Though ultimately everyone is in so many leaks it won’t even matter. Unless you have committed some kind of crime, having possibly embarrassing personal details leaked is the reality for everyone right now.
Also, character assassinations. Good luck telling fact from fiction!
I think we are approaching a future where no one will care. An example would be the Canadian prime minister who had photos of him doing black face as a teenager emerge. And nothing happened because everyone has embarrassing teenage past actions.
A good example would be the pedo felon sitting in the Whitehouse.
>An example would be the Canadian prime minister who had photos of him doing black face as a teenager emerge.
He was a teacher at the time, at West Point Grey Academy, not a teenager. [1]
I'm not saying people can't grow and make mistakes throughout their life, and become better people, but it was definitely not a teenage mistake.
[1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-votes-2019-trudeau-b...
My memory of it is fuzzy but I feel like that exemplifies the point more. No one really faces any consequences for this stuff leaking unless it’s truly bad. After all these hacks everyone is going to have embarrassing details leaked but it probably won’t matter.