The average political campaign has three thousand points of data about you, ranging from where you shop and what you buy, to what you watch on television, to whether or not you own a gun.

They take this information and use it target you with specific ads and content designed to sway you in one direction or another.

And whether or not you think that works, it does.

This information comes to us courtesy of a guy named McKay Coppins.

There are far more sophisticated schemes of course, notably the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which isn’t anywhere near dead or over.

And these are the kinds of things we know about.

If a dozen political campaigns can amass this much information on you, so can two dozen governments. So can five dozen corporations.

The real problem is that the average person gives away all this data for free, by carrying a phone and using Facebook or Instagram for example.

My recommendation is: Stop that.

Rid your life, to the extent possible, of Facebook and Amazon, Microsoft and especailly Google. Their free email isn’t truly free.

Run an adlocker at the minimum. Run a VPN. Dump your browsing data from your browser every time.

Refuse to collaborate.

It’s a start.