A Starter Guide to Protecting Your Data From Hackers and Corporations

How do I deal with having to have a new account for every service and website? Should I be using new email addresses?

A new email address for every account is a big undertaking! I’d recommend having an email address for the accounts that are most important to you and then having one that you use to sign up for things that are less important. There are also services that will let you create “burner” emails that you can use to sign-up with services, and if you use an Apple device there’s a “Hide My Email” setting.

What tips would you offer to those looking to keep their digital privacy while crossing the US border (or otherwise entering or exiting the States)?

It really depends on what levels of risk you as an individual could face. Some people traveling across the border are likely to face higher scrutiny than others—for instance nationality, citizenship, and profession could all make a difference. Even what you’ve said on social media or in messaging apps could potentially be used against you.

Personally, the first thing I would do is think about what is on my phone: the kind of messages I have sent (and received), what I have posted publicly, and log out (or remove) what I consider to be the most sensitive apps from my phone (such as email). A burner phone might seem like a good idea, although this isn’t the right idea for everyone and it could bring more suspicion on you. It’s better to have a travel phone—one that you only use for travel that has nothing sensitive on it or connected to it.

My colleague Andy Greenberg and I have put together a guide that covers a lot more than this: such as pre-travel steps you can take, locking down your devices, how to think about passwords, and minimizing the data you are carrying. It’s here. Also, senior writer Lily Hay Newman and I have produced a (long) guide specifically about phone searches at the US border.

Would you recommend against having a device like Alexa in your home? Or are there particular products or steps you can take to make a smart device more secure?

Something that’s always listening in your home—what could go wrong? It’s definitely not great for overall surveillance culture.

Recently Amazon also reduced some of the privacy options for Alexa devices. So if you’re going to use a smart speaker, then I’d look into what each device’s privacy settings are and then go from there.

How do you see people’s willingness to hand over information about their lives to AI playing into surveillance?

The amount of data that AI companies have—and continue to—hoover up really bothers me. There’s no doubt that AI tools can be useful in some settings and to some people (personally, I seldom use generative AI). But I would generally say people don’t have enough awareness about how much they’re sharing with chatbots and the companies that own them. Tech companies have scraped vast swathes of the web to gather the data they claim is needed to create generative AI—often with little regard for content creators, copyright laws, or privacy. On top of this, increasingly, firms with reams of people’s posts are looking to get in on the AI gold rush by selling or licensing that information.