The short answer is yes, and the longer answer involves an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars that has been quietly built on the premise that you either do not know or do not care. Most people are somewhere in between: vaguely aware that their data is being collected, occasionally unsettled by an ad that seems to know too much, and not sure what, if anything, they could realistically do about it. This uncertainty is, in a sense, the business model.

What Is Actually Happening with Your Data

Every click, search, purchase, and location check generates data that is collected, packaged, and sold. Data broker companies compile profiles on individuals that can include hundreds or thousands of data points, covering everything from browsing habits and financial behavior to physical location history and family relationships. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse identified at least 750 unique data brokerages operating in the United States in 2025 alone, and the global industry is projected to approach several hundred billion dollars in the coming years. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse documents how these profiles have been used to target vulnerable populations with predatory advertising, screen job applicants and tenants, and in some cases identify individuals for government surveillance. One of the largest data brokers in existence claims profiles on over 300 million Americans, each with more than 10,000 individual consumer attributes.

A Pew Research study found that 67% of Americans say they understand little to nothing about what companies are doing with their personal data, up from 59% in 2019. The trend is moving in the wrong direction. Meanwhile, 77% of internet users worldwide say they are worried about personal information being stolen, and 75% worry about data being used for marketing without their consent. The concern is widespread; the understanding of what to do about it is considerably less so.

The Case for Caring, Even if You Have Nothing to Hide

The most common reason people give for not worrying about online privacy is that they have nothing to hide. This framing misunderstands what privacy is and what it protects. Privacy is not about concealing wrongdoing; it is about maintaining control over how you are seen, categorized, and targeted. The data collected about you is used to determine what prices you are shown, what credit you are offered, what news you encounter, and what advertisements follow you around the internet. These are not neutral processes. They are decisions being made about you, using information you never consciously chose to share, by companies whose interests are not aligned with yours.

Data breaches make the stakes concrete. When a data broker holding profiles on hundreds of millions of people is compromised, the effect is not just inconvenience: it is your financial history, contact information, and personal associations in the hands of whoever bought the data. Major data broker breaches in 2025 alone exposed tens of millions of records, contributing to an estimated $21 billion in identity theft losses from broker breaches over the past decade.

What You Can Actually Do About It

The asymmetry between how easy it is to collect data and how difficult it is to remove it is real, but it is not insurmountable. Automated removal services send deletion requests to data brokers on your behalf and follow up when data reappears, which it frequently does. Checking whether is Incogni legit is a reasonable starting point: Surfshark’s data removal service covers over 420 data broker sites and regularly scans for new listings, handling the repeated opt-out requests that make manual removal practically impossible to maintain. It does not make you invisible, but it meaningfully reduces the data available to anyone looking you up.

Browser-level protections, strong and unique passwords managed through a password manager, and two-factor authentication on key accounts address different parts of the problem: what gets collected during browsing, what can be accessed if a password is stolen, and what requires more than a password to breach. None of these are technically demanding, and together they raise the cost of targeting you specifically above what most opportunistic attackers are willing to invest.

The Bigger Picture

Online privacy matters not just as an individual concern but as a structural one. Ninety-one percent of people surveyed support stronger regulation of data brokers. The gap between that sentiment and the actual state of data protection law reflects how effectively the industry has operated below public awareness. Writing clearly and irreverently about the world, as Points in Case aims to do, includes being willing to say plainly that yes, online privacy is really that important, and the people who profit from your indifference are very much counting on you to keep shrugging it off.