Q: Do you have any advice for how to talk to friends and family about privacy? I know how to counter the “nothing to hide” argument with the following: “O.K., give me all your passwords then!” But past that, it’s sometimes hard to explain the problems that giving up your data introduces. My friends will say they don’t care about Facebook having their data, because they don’t know any employees at Facebook, so they’re not worried about embarrassment. How can we make privacy more personal? It seems to me like we need to find ways to make the harms more tangible on an individual level, but I don’t have enough examples in my back pocket. Would love any advice on how to have these more productive discussions.

A: Making the digital privacy issue personal is a constant struggle. Here’s how one ad industry veteran put it to me: “People only care about privacy in the abstract — not in reality. I think it’s because often, it’s either privacy or spending money. They don’t want to pay for most of the services online. They’d rather have this low-grade anxiety than spend money.”

But as I argued last week, I think that’s because people have a limited definition of privacy. It’s not just about data breaches or having access to their pictures or passwords. And one way to drive that point home to friends, family or anyone else is to show them not only how much information is being captured but also how that information is being sliced and diced and used to make value judgments about a person.

I’d point your family members to a piece like this, where a woman looks at data collected about her and the categories they fall into:

“My Mastercard UK shopping interests, for instance, includes travel and leisure to Canada (I have in fact been to Canada recently for work) and frequent transactions in Bagel Restaurants (I can remember one night out where I’ve purchased quite a few bagels). Others are Experian UK classifies me according to my assumed financial situation (for some inexplicable reason I’m classified as “City Prosperity:World-Class Wealth”), the data broker Acxiom even placed me in a category called ‘Alcohol at Home Heavy Spenders.’”

Maybe your family members are O.K. with that information being collected by financial companies and credit agencies. But are they fine with those customers trading that information with other companies (often this happens without our knowledge)? Our current data dystopia isn’t just about forking over information; it’s also about how that information moves across the web and how it leaks to both neutral and bad actors.

What I’m Reading

This Wall Street Journal article on online trust score companies. These companies are a sobering example of the secondary layer of the internet that we can’t see and that is gobbling up our information and making decisions that affect our lives.

The Financial Times has a deep dive on facial recognition and the reasons for concern. In sum: It’s not just that your face might be in a database; it’s how the databases can get shared and how the purpose of that monitoring changes over time in ways that might affect your privacy.