The Mountain View firm is reportedly changing the conditions of access to its ‘dark web report’ service, which allows users to check whether their personal data has been part of a data leak on the dark web.
A tool that was previously only available to paying subscribers of the Google One service is soon to be made available to all users. It is a utility that many people will appreciate, given the unfortunate wave of hacks and mass data thefts that have taken place in recent years. It is the “dark web report”, a section in which, if we want, we can check if our personal data has been leaked on the dark web.
Although until now only Google One subscribers could enjoy this report, a notification has announced that the feature will be released for all regular Google service clients (such as Gmail accounts) by the end of July.
There are already some independent platforms that allow you to check if your email or phone number has appeared in any data breach, such as ‘Have I Been Pwned‘ wave tool Cybernews to check if a password we use has been leaked. But, predictably, this new tool by Google may be much better given the obvious technical superiority of the American giant.
According to the information page for this product, called Dark Web Report, the service allows you to check several important data that may have been leaked on the dark web: your name, postal address, phone number, email, username and password. For users in the United States, it also allows you to check if your social security number has been leaked, so it is possible that in the future they will also support searching for national ID numbers in other countries. Spain is among the 46 countries where this report is currently available.
Following the change in the privileges required to access this feature, which is expected to be available by the end of July, users will be able to find it in the “Results about you” section, which allows them to find websites located by Google that contain information about the user. However, Results about you is not yet available in Spain, so it is possible that it will be placed in different sections of the Google account depending on the country.
You can now try the function
According to Google’s help page at the time of writing, the dark web report is still not available to use for free. However, it can be tested without a One subscription to check, on a one-off basis, whether the email address has been leaked. To do this, users need to go to the Google Help page. Google Oneand click on “Try now” in the dark web report box. If Google’s plans are confirmed, it is possible that the route to follow from Spain will be the same, with the difference that the report will also include all the aforementioned data, instead of just the email. At the same time, the “Google One VPN” service stopped working on June 20.
