John Oliver proves how easy it is to buy people’s data, does it to D.C. politicians

Do you think your data is safe? Think again!

As John Oliver explains in the latest Last Week Tonight episode, a lot of what we do online is being tracked by someone, with data brokers constantly making money by selling our data to third parties.

We have shady data brokers who collect your data and build profiles that can track who you are, where you are, and what you are most likely to do or buy, and you can't change it.

What do we do? It's a bit tricky because the economy of the internet right now is built on this practice. You are the product when you take for granted all the free stuff online. They make money by selling your data.

In the end of the video, Oliver shows how easy it is to buy information about people online, by running his own data-harvesting experiment on the politicians in Washington D.C.

There are some steps you can take to protect your privacy online. Here are seven quick ways to improve your privacy in 2022, and here are some other suggestions for privacy safeguards you can take.

Want more?