There are plenty of guides available on how to protect your data, how to secure yourself online, and how to stop digital snoops from tracking you across the web and then profiting from that intrusion. (Sorry, “monetization”.) You should do these things. But if a cascading series of revelations this past week has taught us anything, it's that all of those steps amount to triage. The things you can control add up to very little next to the things you can’t.

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