We know that we’re tracked, but what remains largely invisible is the massive economy working behind the scenes (or “mirror”) to buy, sell, trade and bid on you and your data. I’ve seen estimates that claim there are up to 4000 data brokers in the US alone. And what’s worse is that they are largely unregulated, making the data market a total free-for-all. What can you do to curb this tracking and selling of data? We’ll discuss that in the conclusion of my interview with the EFF’s Bennett Cyphers.

Bennett Cyphers is a staff technologist on the Tech Projects team at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). He contributes to a variety of different projects within EFF, most of them tied to privacy and competition. In the past year, he’s worked on the tracker-blocking browser extension Privacy Badger, provided technical advice to lawyers and activists, and read and re-read the California Consumer Privacy Act. Before coming to EFF, he was a policy intern at Access Now and earned a Master’s degree for work on privacy-preserving machine learning. In his spare time he designs t-shirts for fake punk rock bands.