“I have nothing to hide,” used to be the normal answer to surveillance programs that included cameras, border checks, and informal questioning by police officers.

Privacy used to be regarded as a notion that was widely maintained in many nations, with a few tweaks to rules and regulations here and there sometimes made only for the sake of the greater good.

As monitoring grows more prevalent in our everyday lives, privacy may no longer be seen as an inherent right – and it appears that we, too, are engaging in our own particular kinds of online digital stalking and spying.

Everything from our online surfing to mobile devices and IoT equipment put in our homes has the potential to destroy our privacy and personal security, and you can’t rely on vendors or ever-changing surveillance policies to keep them intact.

“Nothing to conceal” is no longer enough. We must all do all in our power to protect our personal privacy not only from government agencies and corporations but also from one another.

Data management is at the heart of privacy.
Data is such a broad topic that it is important dividing it down into separate groupings before studying how each area relates to your privacy and security.

Internet use and website visits
An Internet Service Provider (ISP) monitors Internet traffic, which can be hijacked. While there is little consumers can do about ISP-level assaults, the online pages you visit can also be monitored by cookies, which are little pieces of text downloaded and saved by your browser. Browser plugins may potentially track your activities across various websites.

Message and email content
Our email accounts are frequently the gateway to all of our other valuable accounts, as well as a record of our correspondence with friends, relatives, and coworkers. Hackers may attempt to get our credentials using credential stuffing, social engineering, or phishing schemes as central hubs to other online services in order to leap to other services.

Phone numbers
In targeted attacks, fraudsters use social engineering tactics to mimic their victims in phone calls to service providers.

Online purchases and financial information
When you perform an online purchase, this information may contain credentials for financial services such as PayPal or credit card information such as card numbers, expiration dates, and security codes.

Source: Zdnet