Why You Need to Protect Your Data

As you read this, your data is being stolen or improperly shared with people and organizations you never agreed to give it to. This is just the reality of using the internet in 2025.

That sounds like an overly dramatic statement but the truth of it remains. It may not be something you consider sensitive or critical like your credit card information or email account password but there is a billion dollar industry based on gathering and selling as much data about every single internet user as possible. These data brokers use mostly legally obtained information that you give to websites, like cookies, and with all of these tiny pieces of information they build a profile of each user until they may as well have directly accessed all of your accounts.

The most innocent use of this kind of data is to sell to advertisers that are looking for very specific target demographics. It is easier for them to know the likes and dislikes, habits and patterns of their audience so they can customize their ads to better influence you.

The less innocent use cases involve hackers or scammers trying to find vulnerable people to prey on and police forces or governments conducting surveillance on their citizens or foreign adversaries.

Even if you have nothing to hide or that you are a low-interest target for hackers, you still need to be worried. The first reason is because data can be manipulated and we do not yet have strong enough systems to verify and investigate the integrity of data. The second reason is that these mass data collection efforts result in the removal of the personal — it isn’t about you. It becomes about what the person analyzing the data can assume about you based off a giant database of data points. These two reasons come together in ways that make it dangerous to anyone, whether you have anything valuable or secrets to hide.

One example goes as follows. Let’s say the government is trying to find a murderer and has collected their data from various social media and other sites. They might be able to say that it is statistically very unlikely someone would visit all the same sites as they did on the same day, so they might look to find if any other user accessed the same sites around the same time as they did. Maybe they are looking to catch a coconspirator or hoping the criminal poorly encrypted their internet traffic, either way — let’s say you happened to visit the same websites they did on the same days. You are now a person of interest in a murder case simply because of a total coincidence and you better have solid alibis for when the murder happened or you may be in for a tough case of proving you are innocent. It is very hard after all to prove you didn’t do something.

This may seem like a tiny risk but it’s very real. It already happens with things like fingerprint and other DNA evidence, but that at least is something physical and harder to obtain. With your internet data there are likely gigabytes upon gigabytes of your information across every kind of database imaginable.

I haven’t even gone into the way your data puts those around you — your family or roommates, your coworkers, and your friends — at risk as well. Simply by having your phones near each other, that can generate data that allows someone to track them through you.

This only scratches the surface of why you need to care about protecting your data. Every day more news comes out about major technology corporations willingly and even joyfully violating our rights and putting our data at risk. The old motto of “having nothing to hide” simply will not protect you or the people you care about. You need to take active steps to secure your online identity before it is too late.

This is why I started working on my homelab — a system of servers running free and private applications that allow me to stop using the internet for storing documents and other personal data. Now that I’ve seen both how easy it is to leave the world of huge technology corporations behind if you have a moderate level of coding ability, my goal is to help as many people do the same.