Gmail is perhaps the most popular free email service provider in the world. Everyone who owns an Android mobile phone has to sign up for a new Gmail email address. Some people use multiple Gmail addresses trying to isolate their personal and professional or business lives.
If you use your email address for various online services then it could have become a part of the occasional data breaches or leaks. Fortunately, Google has made it very easy for anyone to find whether their email address from Gmail has been included in one of these known data breaches. They have provided a useful tool through Google One.
Here is how it is done:
- In any web browser, login to your Google account at https://myaccount.google.com/.
- Then select the Security section and scroll down until you see the text “See if your email address is on Dark web”. You have to click on Run a scan with Google One.
- On the next screen, you will be shown some more information about the scan. After reading this information, you can proceed by clicking on the Run scan button.
- After a few seconds of scanning, you will see the results on your screen. If you are fortunate, then you won’t see any results. However, if you do see your email address included in the data breaches, it will display further steps to be taken.
This is an easy way to find out whether your Gmail email address was part of any of the known data breaches. It can tell about the known data breaches only for which the data is publicly available. But it won’t be able to check for the data breaches that are not yet known or for which the data has not been released. Additionally, it works only for the email addresses from the Gmail.