Tools like Signal, DuckDuckGo, and Tor are worth using and supporting with donations because when more people use them, individuals are less likely to be singled out and thought suspicious because they use encryption. When it comes to government surveillance, you might not feel that it matters for you, but journalists and political activists depend on privacy tools to do their work. Or you could be targeted by ransomware that demands that you infect your friends in order to get the key to unlock your computer. In addition, your email account could be compromised and used to send email to everyone in your address book in the hopes of breaching their accounts. This malware worked by scanning the internet for hardware that was powered by default usernames and passwords. 1 This created huge bottlenecks that made it hard for people to access major sites powered by that provider, like Amazon, Twitter, Netflix, and Spotify. An example is the attack that happened in October 2016, where many hacked Internet of Things devices (cameras, routers, DVRs, and printers) were used in an attack on a large internet infrastructure provider. First, your devices might be infected to become part of a “botnet” used to launch large-scale denial of service attacks. You may not be an interesting target or have very important data to protect, but what you do as an individual does makes a difference to others on the internet, for several reasons. Many people feel this way, and it’s not uncommon to throw up your hands and say that if someone did want to hack your data, there would be nothing you could do to prevent it anyway. When does one even begin to have time to deal with any of this? You may feel that you have nothing to hide anyway and that there are minuscule chances of anyone wanting to find your data. Now that you’ve read about all the different types of security issues and possible invasions of privacy, you might be feeling overwhelmed. Applying Best Practices Why It’s Important to Practice Effective Security