By Shubham Agarwal
Keeping your data private online often feels like walking through a minefield. One wrong step and BOOM! -- heaps of your personal information are suddenly in the wrong hands. For this reason, most of us go the extra mile to ensure our data doesn't get compromised. We dial up privacy settings to the max, block web trackers, and maybe even browse in incognito mode. But I hate to break it to you: You've likely blown up all of that minefield a while ago.
The harsh truth is that there's a good chance that shady "data brokers" are already trading your identity for pennies on the web, even if you've been super-careful online in the past, like me. I consider myself more privacy-minded than most, but despite all my years of treading softly on the web and locking down my data beneath layers of authentication, I recently discovered that many of my personal details were being collected and traded.