Make Yourself Expensive: A Field Guide to Hardening the Devices You Carry

There’s a sentence I keep coming back to: you are not the customer, you are the inventory.

When a data broker sells your home address, your daily movements, and the names of your relatives, you are not a person being served. You are a product being moved. The buyers are marketers, sure. But also stalkers. And — this is the part that changed how I think about all of it — government agencies that aren’t allowed to collect this information directly, and have figured out they can simply buy it instead. The Federal Trade Commission has documented brokers holding hundreds of millions of people’s precise locations, scraped from the ordinary apps on ordinary phones. The same data has been tracked reaching Customs and Border Protection. The phone in your pocket is a node in a supply chain, and the product is you.

This series is about making that supply chain more expensive to run.

Why “privacy” is the wrong word

The word privacy makes this sound like a preference — like whether you keep your curtains open. It invites the worst response in the genre: “I have nothing to hide.”

That misses what’s actually happening. The issue isn’t that someone might see something embarrassing. It’s that a detailed, purchasable model of your life — where you live, where you go, who you know, what you fear — is a tool, and tools get used by whoever holds them. A model like that is what lets a harasser find an address, an employer find a reason, an agency find a target. You don’t have to have done anything for the model to be dangerous. You just have to be in it.

So I’d replace privacy with cost. Surveillance, like any other operation, runs on a budget. Mass collection works because each person is cheap to track. The entire game, then, is to make yourself expensive — not invisible, which is mostly impossible, but costly enough that the automated systems move on to easier inventory and the targeted ones have to spend real money and time. Every setting in this series is a way to raise your price.

That reframe matters because it tells you what to ignore. You don’t need to do everything. You need to do the few things that raise your cost the most.

Two readers, two tiers

This series is written for two people, and most of us are the first one most of the time.

The first is everyone. You’re not being personally hunted; you’re being harvested, ambiently, along with everybody else, because it’s cheap. For you, the goal is to opt out of the cheap harvest — to stop being the easy, default inventory. Twenty minutes per device gets you most of the way.

The second is higher-risk — organizers, immigrants, journalists, anyone whose phone or laptop could actually be searched or seized. For you the threat isn’t ambient, it’s specific: a border crossing, an arrest, an ICE encounter, a targeted attack. The everyday steps still apply, but you need a second layer, and you need it stated honestly, because in your situation a comforting half-truth is worse than nothing.

Each piece in the series is built in those two tiers, clearly marked. Read the first. Read the second only if it’s you — but if it’s you, read it carefully.

The one thing to carry out of the whole series

If you remember nothing else, remember this, because it’s the thread that runs through every device:

The physical state of your device protects you more reliably than the law does — especially if you’re not a citizen, because that’s exactly where the legal protections are thinnest.

A phone or laptop that is powered all the way off is in a genuinely different, stronger state than one that’s merely locked or asleep — hard enough that the forensic tools police and border agents use struggle with it most. A passphrase you’ve memorized is better protected, under current U.S. law, than your face or fingerprint. And the law itself, the part people most want to lean on, is the least dependable layer: it’s unsettled, it’s split across the country, and at the border it bends hard against non-citizens. So we lead with the things that don’t depend on a court ruling going your way: turn it off, use a real passphrase, carry less.

What’s in the series

Four pieces, one per device, each in two tiers, each starting with the single highest-leverage move:

And alongside the series, a companion tool: a free, no-account, nothing-leaves-your-browser walk-through for getting your existing data off the brokers — the cleanup to go with the hardening. It’s the Opt-Out section of this same site.

None of this makes you disappear. That’s not the goal, and anyone promising it is selling something. The goal is smaller and more achievable and, honestly, more powerful: to stop being cheap. To make the people and systems that traffic in you spend more than you’re worth.

Let’s make you expensive.

Start with the device in your hand. The deepest reference for any of this is the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense, which I’ll point to throughout.