Three Simple Rules for Protecting Your Data
In 2023, digital privacy is, in many ways, a fiction: Knowingly or not, we are all constantly streaming, beaming, being surveilled, scattering data wherever we go. Companies, governments, and our fellow citizens know more than we could ever imagine about our body, our shopping habits, even our kids. The question now isn’t how to protect your privacy altogether—it’s how to make choices that help you reclaim boundaries around what you most care about. Read on for our simple rules for managing your privacy, or get a list of personalized recommendations.
Three simple rules for managing your privacy
Think concretely.
The more you conceptualize the internet as a real place, the more intuitive it becomes. Consider physical analogues to your online behavior as much as possible: You may be perfectly comfortable reading a newspaper or watching a movie in public, but you’d probably think twice before sharing your private medical information or details about your love life with a stranger. By that same logic, you may want to focus on protecting health and dating data more than on safeguarding less intimate information.
Share narrowly.
Much of your online privacy is out of your control. But you do have power over how much personal information you willingly share with companies and the world. Don’t share anything publicly on social media that you wouldn’t want being seen by your boss, your parents, or your children. Think twice about giving online retailers your zip code or birth date in exchange for a onetime discount. Your personal information is valuable to other people; don’t give it away for cheap.
Don’t panic.
“Not all hope is lost,” William Budington, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. “There are things you can do to protect your privacy by 85, 90, 95 percent that will not add much friction to your life.” Much of the discourse about privacy and personal security can be quite extreme, suggesting that if you don’t take certain steps, you’re asking to be hacked; that anyone who doesn’t buy X or do Y is an idiot; that the only way to live responsibly online is to apply so many restrictions that any benefit new technologies offer is outweighed by all that self-imposed inconvenience. This isn’t just alienating; it’s incorrect.
As experts I spoke with repeatedly told me, privacy is not a product. It’s not one-size-fits-all. It’s not binary: safe or unsafe, exposed or protected. It’s a lifestyle, a process, a series of decisions—the particular set of trade-offs (of time, of money, of inconvenience) you are willing
