There’s a lot of guides explaining how to protect your online privacy, but none of them tell why they exist in the first place. They exist because privacy is understated. We don’t value it enough. Here are the reasons.

Threats to privacy are not obvious

Despite recent attempts to regulate online data processing (e.g the GDPR in the EU) as well as privacy breaches, it’s still not clear why all of that threatens privacy. By collecting data on individuals, corporations can have an accurate description of who you are, For example, in this study, researchers show that the profiling of Facebook (based on likes) is a more accurate representation of people’s personalities than their friends view. On top of that, they also explain that this digital profiling is very powerful. It does a great job at predicting offline data: political opinions, health status, and much more. This is one reason why online privacy should not be overlooked. By tracking you and gathering always more data, private companies can draw a model that represents you and gives them a lot of power.