How your personal information can be used against you
Many people don’t realize how the information being collected about them can ultimately be turned against them, putting them at a disadvantage. Even when it comes to trivial or seemingly innocent information, you can’t even begin to imagine how that information might be used against you in unexpected, indirect, or creative ways.
These days people install and use all kinds of (social media) applications on their devices that collect information about them constantly throughout the day. Information such as their communications, contacts, notes, location, health, personal preferences when it comes to food, entertainment, the opposite sex, you name it. Even Internet Service Providers (ISPs) collect and sell their customer’s internet usage details, such as what websites they visit and their location, to third party advertisers.
Even if someone takes privacy seriously and shares as little information about themselves as possible, most people today don’t seem to care much about it. As a result, interacting with others can lead to personal data being exposed indirectly. For instance, if you run your own private email server but send an email to a friend who uses Gmail, all of that correspondence becomes accessible to Google. Or if you use Signal Private Messenger, but your contact uses a bridge from Signal to Telegram or some other insecure messenger app, now your communication is not as private anymore as you thought.
All this personal information is gathered by data brokers who combine it with other datasets to create detailed personal profiles, which are then sold to marketers or other entities. Quite often the information about you may not even be explicitly present in the datasets, but can be inferred through inferential modeling, profiling and behavior analysis. For example:
- Frequent visits to baby product websites, combined with location data near maternity stores, might lead to an inference that someone is expecting a child.
- Browsing habits (such as visiting sites targeting specific age groups) can infer age, gender, or income level. This is how YouTube plans to check the age of a user with AI based on their activity on the platform.
- Social media likes, group memberships, or news sites visited could give away political views.
- Online searches for symptoms or medications can suggest medical conditions.
- Frequent communication with certain contacts or location overlaps can infer social connections or marital status.
One example of how this kind of information can be used against you was recently explained by Cory Doctorow in a short documentary titled “Waarom tech-platforms opzettelijk steeds slechter werken” by VPRO Tegenlicht (July 25th 2025). At around 10 minutes and 20 seconds in he explains:
So let’s take nurses. Nurses don’t work in tech, but tech has taken over nursing. Three national apps have taken over contract nursing, hiring from the dozens or hundreds of local firms that used to do contract nurse hiring for hospitals. So, when a nurse signs on for a shift, the app goes to a data broker and buys that nurse’s recent credit history. And if the nurse is carrying a high credit card debt load, especially delinquent debt, then the app pays that nurse less because people who are economically desperate work for less money. Now, the impulse to exploit desperate labor is not new, but even the most wicked coal boss of the 19th century could not employ enough guys in green eye shades in a giant boiler room to adjust everyone’s pay a hundred times a minute to make this work. When you add computers to a sector that is concentrated and fears neither the discipline of regulators nor the discipline of labor nor the discipline of competitors, when you operate in that environment, that enshitigenic environment, then as soon as technology infects the sector then the sector immediately enshitifies. Cory Doctorow
Similar tactics are being used by other companies such as Uber in order to pay as little money as possible to drivers. You can imagine that if Uber can deduce, based on a driver’s personal data and profile, that they might be desperate for income, then Uber might choose to pay them less for a given route compared to some other driver who might be less desperate.
Constant surveillance
To explain it another way, if your employer knows you’re in a financially difficult situation, they might put you in a position where you have to go along with certain decisions that you would otherwise not agree with, because they know they can probably manipulate you and pressure you into going along. Or they might try to hire you for a lot less money if they know you’re a little desperate for income.
Now imagine how malicious actors (such as robberments, intelligence agencies, hackers or scammers) might use this information against you. Let’s say you’re using an insecure means of communication when talking with your family, say an instant messenger like WhatsApp or Telegram, SMS messages or a regular phone call that can be eavesdropped on via your Telecom service provider. You talk to a friend or family member and in passing mention how you’re in a financially difficult situation right now and need money or another job quickly. That information could be used by malicious actors to manipulate you. For example, they might send someone to ‘accidentally’ meet you and offer you a job that seems perfect but is actually a scam. Or, if they know based on the location data that they have of you that you visit certain places regularly at certain times, they might, without your knowledge, arrange for you to meet a beautiful young woman “by chance” at one of those places who is totally into you. And because they might have gathered a lot of information about your personal preferences, their female operative will fit exactly what you’re attracted to and know exactly what to tell you and how to behave to get you to like her. This is called a honey trap (or honeypot) — a deceptive strategy used to lure or entrap a target, typically to gather information, expose intentions, or manipulate behavior.
These are just a few examples of how your personal information can be used against you. In an ideal world, privacy wouldn’t be so important. But we don’t live in an ideal world. In this world, you have to distrust everything, be skeptical of everything and constantly be on your guard.
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