Take Back Your Data
A Kiwi Guide to Opting Out of Surveillance Capitalism
Every scroll, click and swipe leaves a trail. That trail becomes data, and data becomes profit for a company.
Our personal information is harvested, packaged and sold by digital data brokers to advertisers, insurers, political campaigns and countless other organisations.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, we’re not immune. Our details appear in offshore databases, scraped and commodified without our knowledge or consent. They’re traded, combined and traded again, allowing more corporations to learn where we go, what we buy, what we believe and our favourite toothpaste.
At first, it can feel pretty icky. But the stakes are becoming much higher.
In the wrong hands, personal data can be used for manipulation, discrimination, surveillance and fraud. Meanwhile, AI is making phishing, impersonation and cyberattacks faster and more convincing which means making strong, unique passwords, passkeys and multi-factor authentication more important than ever.
But we are not powerless.
Here is a guide to Take Back Your Data, created to give everyday Kiwis a practical path towards greater privacy, better online security and less corporate surveillance.
It’s about resisting surveillance capitalism and shifting a little power back from the tech billionaires profiting from our lives.