I’ve worked in cybersecurity for years. I know what ends up on the dark web. Your name, email, password, phone number, maybe your Social Insurance Number. Breaches pile up: LinkedIn, Desjardins, Facebook, Equifax. At some point, you think: what’s the point?

That’s where it gets dangerous.

Because abandoning privacy isn’t just a risk to your bank account or credit score. It’s a risk to your freedom to think. To your ability to choose. To your children’s future.

Fatigue, the Perfect Trap

When everyone says “my data is already everywhere, it’s too late,” that suits exactly those who profit from your data. Collective resignation is the ultimate victory for actors who want to profile, target, and influence you.

Bruce Schneier, one of the world’s most respected security experts, summed up the situation in one sentence in 2025: “Companies, from big tech monopolies to invisible data brokers, spy on us even more extensively.” And yet, he keeps fighting. Not because he thinks he’ll win easily. Because giving up means losing for sure.

Compare that to road safety. Yes, there are accidents. Yes, people die on the roads despite seatbelts, airbags, and the Highway Code. Do we stop wearing seatbelts for all that? No. We keep reducing risks, even imperfectly, because every layer of protection has real value.

Privacy is the same. It’s not all or nothing.

Manipulating Someone Is Easier Than You Think

What worries me most isn’t identity theft. It’s manipulation.

In The Engineers of Chaos (2019), political scientist Giuliano da Empoli dissects how strategists (those behind Trump, Brexit, Salvini, and others) learned to exploit social networks and algorithms to reshape public opinion. He describes three complementary strategies I summarize as: pull, push, and stall.

Pull is building an online community that gives a sense of belonging to people who already feel close to a thesis. You don’t convert strangers: you find those who already doubt, welcome them, tell them they’re right to be suspicious. Trump or Brexit supporters weren’t converted overnight. They were found, then fed. And to find them, you need their data.

Push is deliberately amplifying the most extreme positions, conspiracy theories, and provocations — not to impose them on everyone, but to shift the centre of debate. When Salvini or Nigel Farage say the unthinkable, the rest of the political spectrum is forced to react on their terms. What was unacceptable yesterday becomes simply “controversial” today. Algorithms accelerate this shift because outrage generates clicks, and clicks generate revenue.

Stall is flooding the information space with noise, contradictions, and false leads until the ordinary citizen no longer knows what or whom to trust. The goal isn’t to convince that the false is true. It’s to convince that everything is false, including legitimate sources. Result: people disconnect, abstain, or vote with their gut rather than their head.

Three strategies. One prerequisite: knowing who you are.

And that’s exactly what your data enables.

My Children Never Asked Permission

My children grew up with devices in their hands. They never had to decide whether they wanted to be profiled. It was already done before they were old enough to understand what that meant.

Their musical tastes, embarrassing questions on Google, teenage anxieties typed at 2 a.m. into a search bar: all of that exists somewhere in a database, ready to be exploited when the time comes.

Philosopher Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, turns this logic with surgical precision: “If you have nothing to hide, you are nothing.” That’s not a quip. It’s the idea that privacy isn’t the guilty person’s refuge — it’s the space where a free identity is built.

When I hear people say “I have nothing to hide,” I want to ask them: “And your children? Them neither?” Because in ten years, an algorithm that knows your son went through a difficult period at 15 can sell him something, make him believe something, or push him somewhere — and he won’t even know why he’s so convinced.

What “Not Giving Up” Means Concretely

I’m not saying you can become invisible. Nor that the solution is to erase everything.

What I’m saying is that not giving up takes several forms, and some are more accessible than you think.

The first is staying indignant. When Equifax is breached and exposes the financial data of 147 million people, the normal reaction would be lasting anger. But we shrug because we’re exhausted. That’s exactly the problem. These companies hold your data without you really choosing, profit from it, and face minimal consequences when they fail to protect it. Your indignation is a political signal. Don’t extinguish it.

The second is exercising rights that already exist. In Quebec, Bill 25 in force since 2023 gives you concrete rights: access data held about you by a company, have it corrected, withdraw consent, request de-indexing. Most people don’t know these rights exist. Exercising them, even once, is an act of resistance that costs little and sends a message.

The third is acting in daily choices:

  • Refuse non-essential cookies when asked.
  • Review permissions granted to apps on your phone: does your weather app really need your microphone?
  • Use a browser that doesn’t track you, like Firefox or Brave, and encrypted messaging like Signal for sensitive conversations.
  • Prefer services whose business model doesn’t rely on reselling your data.
  • Teach your children to doubt before sharing, to question what seems obvious, to look for a second source.

And the fourth, often forgotten: vote and advocate with privacy in mind. Support elected officials and organizations pushing for real, not cosmetic, regulation. The Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec exists. Class actions exist. Citizen pressure works — more slowly than we’d like, but it works.

These aren’t perfect solutions. But they’re acts of resistance. And resistance has value even when imperfect.

A Matter of Dignity

At bottom, privacy isn’t a technical question. It’s a question of dignity.

Accepting being profiled without resistance is accepting being reduced to a set of exploitable data. It’s letting commercial or political interests decide for you what you should think, buy, or vote.

I’m not naive. I know the battle is asymmetric, that resources on the other side are infinitely greater than ours. But history has shown us repeatedly that collective resistance, even imperfect, can change the rules of the game. The General Data Protection Regulation in Europe is a concrete example: not perfect, but real.

Privacy is a fight you can lose a little every day and still keep waging. It’s not because you’re wounded that you’ve lost.

References

  • Giuliano da Empoli, The Engineers of Chaos, Éditions Gallimard, 2019.
  • Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, PublicAffairs, 2019.
  • Bruce Schneier, interview “Nearly 10 Years After Data and Goliath, Privacy’s Still Screwed”, February 2025. schneier.com
  • Bruce Schneier, “If the internet helped create the era of mass surveillance, then artificial intelligence will bring about an era of mass spying”, January 2024. schneier.com