"You are now less valuable than the data you produce."

I can't believe I'm quoting Watch Dogs 2, but that line is uncomfortably accurate.

The Illusion of "Free"

Social media isn't free because big tech founders are philanthropists who wake up wanting to keep you entertained out of the goodness of their hearts. It's free because your attention, behaviour, and interaction patterns generate data, and that data is ridiculously profitable.

The more they can infer about you, the more precisely they can run behavioural targeting models, and the more you'll eventually consume. Social media platforms win. Advertisers win. The only person who ends up with the short end of the stick is you.

The Psychology of "Choice"

And this data extraction isn't confined to social platforms anymore. News sites now force you into a so-called "choice": pay a subscription or accept ALL cookies. That doesn't sound like much of a choice at all. Worst of all, most people see that and think, "Who cares, I've got nothing to hide." Right?

But here's the thing most people overlook: those paywalls aren't always about monetisation. They're psychological anchors. The subscription fee is intentionally included to create friction and push you to choose the easier "free" option, where third-party trackers, session replay scripts, browser fingerprinting, and real-time bidding systems quietly turn your data into a product being auctioned in milliseconds behind the scenes.

Even governments, often in the name of safety, enforce policies that threaten privacy, outsourcing enforcement and data retention to private companies that now act as shadow custodians of your most critical, sensitive information.

Correlation Is the Game

You may probably think, what data could they even get that's so useful? On its own, not much. But data in isolation isn't the game. Correlation is.

Cookies and tracking pixels store sessions to see what other websites you visit, not just the website itself, like a leech that doesn't come off. Through aggregators, data brokers, and real-time ad exchanges, they can form an incredibly detailed shadow profile of who you are: personality traits, purchasing probability, political leanings, without you ever lifting a finger to confess it.

Data: The New Gold

Data has become the 21st-century version of gold.

In fact, with the rise of machine learning, LLM fine-tuning, and predictive analytics, your data is most likely worth more than gold. And once they know everything about you, then you as an individual aren't that useful anymore. You become a predictable node in a consumption pipeline, statistically modelled and therefore exploitable. As a unique person, you hold no secrets these systems don't already infer with unnerving accuracy.

It cannot be argued that data has become a critical resource. There are billions, if not trillions, being invested into data pipelines, telemetry infrastructure, observability platforms, and AI models that depend entirely on harvesting data to power innovation, shape economies, influence decisions, and create new opportunities.

Just like gold shaped the physical economies of previous centuries, data now shapes the digital economy of modern times. Infrastructure is no longer just roads and bridges. It's CDNs, identity providers, ad networks, and API endpoints exchanging data at a global scale.

When Data Is Used for Good

There can be tremendous opportunities that are positive and impactful for humanity if this data is used correctly.

Healthcare prediction models, anomaly detection for fraud, AI-assisted diagnostics, and behavioural financial coaching are all powered by data patterns no human could manually observe.

However, as human history shows, we rarely pursue the ethical path when exploitation is the more profitable alternative.

The Cost of Exposure

For an individual, the impact already stings.

Your entire digital identity is hanging by a string, and all it takes is one breach, one S3 bucket left public, one GitHub config accidentally leaked in a Docker image, and your life becomes a permanent data artifact for the rest of human time. And all of this because a chain of third-party services you never knew existed silently hoarded your data "for analytics".

The Business Fallout

However, what people don't understand is that this also affects enterprises, particularly the smaller to mid-sized companies, the startups and scaleups who are just trying to build something great.

They might be GDPR or SOC 2 compliant, but compliance is not the same as security. All it takes is one misconfigured IAM policy, one SSRF vulnerability hidden deep in a microservice, one forgotten staging environment, and that's enough for your entire security posture to fall apart.

That leads to reputational damage, regulatory audits, revoked partnerships, investor panic, and in the harshest cases, complete operational shutdown.

But beyond the internal chaos, these incidents affect thousands, if not millions, of individuals across the globe. Like it or not, that's a responsibility, if not a duty, that companies must honour when handling the digital equivalent of gold.

Defence in Depth

Just like gold requires guarded vaults, data requires defence in depth, not afterthought security patches.

If gold is stored in secure vaults underground with biometric access and 24/7 guards, why should your data be treated any differently?

After all, with how the future is heading, it's already becoming more valuable than gold, especially when AI models require vast amounts of it to operate.

Your own data isn't just worth a fortune: it's the fuel of the next industrial revolution.

And funnily enough, you're the mine that's being used.

So, What Can Be Done?

And so, where does this bring us?

Being a nihilist is great and all, but without any solutions, I'd end up coming off as a complainer. Consequently, I'll outline a two-part solution for both individuals and startups on how they can be on the good side of history with respect to data privacy.

For Individuals: Segregation Is Your Magic Bullet

I don't mean moving off-grid and never touching the internet again (although that could work too). It means reducing the blast radius.

Become multiple identities. Separate your financials, socials, work, education, and any other pillars of your life into different emails, all with different randomly generated credentials.

Use a password manager like KeePass or Bitwarden to generate long, unique strings so that a successful brute force or credential stuffing attack on one service doesn't cascade across your entire digital footprint.

For platforms where real identity isn't legally required, don't give it.

Remember, you owe them nothing.

When forced to provide contact info, use 10-minute mail services or a burner SIM.

Reject cookies, enable automatic cookie purges, disable session persistence, and audit your existing accounts by redacting data they never needed in the first place.

Even if you have almost no energy for this, using websites like Have I Been Pwned will tell you in seconds if your data is already circulating in breach databases.

This is never a "one and done" task. It's a continuous discipline (search up "Kaizen" if that's a concept you like the sound of).

For Startups: Security Is an Enabler

As for the startups, this is going to annoy you, but it has to be said: security is an enabler, not a blocker.

You can have security by design with shift-left practices, threat modelling during sprint planning, and automated IaC validation without slowing down your JIRA tickets or feature velocity.

I get it though, honestly.

Sometimes you just want to spin up a quick container, bypass IaC scans, and push to prod. However, the flip side is that some automated bot crawling Shodan or Censys will find that misconfigured endpoint within days, if not hours.

Zero Trust, deny by default, least privilege in IAM roles. They're simple, and they work really well, so use them.

If you want to build a serious company, bake security into your foundation, because if the foundation is weak, every future feature is just another floor in a house of cards.

Closing Remarks

Hopefully, this highlighted why data privacy isn't a privilege, but a right, a liability surface that you must defend like precious metal.

Right now, you're sitting on a pot of gold, and you should do everything possible to ensure that pot of gold isn't stolen by some malicious actor ready to sell your entire identity for pennies on the dollar to a faceless ad exchange or data broker.