Published On 7/3/2026
It has become common in the current era to find services that require a subscription for everything you want to do, from watching or reading content to managing passwords and private financial accounts, and it is common for users to rely on a large number of subscriptions.
You may think that your biggest problem with having subscriptions to many services, even if you do not use them frequently, is the value of the total monthly subscriptions that you pay, but a report by the American technical website CNET reveals that the large number of subscriptions to paid services poses a real, major danger to users.
This becomes more dangerous when you have a group of subscriptions that you forgot and no longer use, but if these subscriptions do not continue to collect money from you, they continue to collect data about you.
But how can these subscriptions represent a security risk to the user? Can we avoid this danger?
Subscriptions collect data
The CNET report indicates that most subscriptions and paid services collect data about users in order to reuse them in various marketing operations. This data includes user names, phone numbers, and sometimes personal identity data, as well as payment data and various bank cards.
The more services you subscribe to, the more you constantly give these services a large portion of your data, in addition to data about your use of the various services and the way you access them.
This data becomes vulnerable to theft when any cyber attack occurs or data is leaked from companies that manage paid services, as no company is safe from cyber attacks, regardless of its size, according to the CNET report.
Hackers can use the data they steal from different platforms and services to make phishing attacks more realistic and personalized to you, making you more vulnerable to fraud.
Some platforms and services also sell their user data to data brokers, who in turn sell this data to various marketing platforms and companies so that they can use it for advertising targeting, according to the CNET report.
How can you protect yourself from the risks of many subscriptions?
There are several steps you can follow to be able to avoid the risks of many and varied subscriptions, which include:
Abandon subscriptions you don’t use
First, you should search your inbox and bank records for subscriptions and services that you do not use, as such services represent the greatest risk from a financial and cyber perspective.
You must unsubscribe from these services and request the complete cancellation of your account from the platform in an effort to delete the data stored about you and reduce it as much as possible.
Don’t just unsubscribe, delete the account
Sometimes it is not enough to cancel the subscription and stop paying just to delete your account data, as some platforms keep it so that if you decide to return to it later, you can benefit from it.
Some platforms and services delete your data and accounts after a period of time, but usually, you need to request the deletion of data and accounts manually.
International laws require companies and services, whatever they may be, to completely delete user account data and remove it from their databases, otherwise they expose themselves to legal accountability, according to a report by the Norwegian company Promon.
Use fake email
All services and platforms that provide paid subscriptions ask users for an email and key data about them, and it is recommended to use a fake email and fake data when subscribing to protect your privacy and real data.
There are many different services that provide you with fake email addresses that you can use, and these services automatically redirect the emails you receive to your real inbox.
Replace cloud services with on-premises services
The report of the American technical website “XDA” advises users to move to local services instead of cloud services, as they are considered more secure than others.
You can host any service you want to use locally without the need for cloud subscriptions thanks to open source services, as you can find open source services that can be hosted locally for password management services, financial management, and even artificial intelligence models as well.
