Your Digital Footprint Doesn’t Stay Digital

There’s a thing called the Prepper’s Paradox.

If you prepare for a disaster — and successfully avoid it — it looks like your efforts were unnecessary. But if you don’t prepare and something bad happens, then you failed. Emergency planners, firefighters, and security professionals have been stuck in this paradox since the beginning of time.

When I was little, my grandfather was a fireman in Los Angeles County. There was a neighborhood in the hills with no fire hydrants and no water towers, because they were considered unsightly. Firefighters showed up to city council meetings again and again, begging for infrastructure. They were told it would hurt property values.

Decades later, those same communities still burn at regular intervals.

The people who knew how to fix the problem were ignored — because the problem hadn’t happened yet.

In cybersecurity, the threat is usually invisible until things go completely sideways. So people tell themselves stories: I’m too small to be targeted. I have nothing to hide. Security is too difficult, or expensive. I’ll deal with it later.

And “later” often becomes “never.”.

Last week, our friends at 404 Media published two pieces that connect directly to what we talk about here at the Tea.

The first, ‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid, includes this passage:

I want you to sit with the phrase “all kinds of sources.”

Think about data brokers. Think about how messy their data is. During my own data-footprint reduction process, I found multiple brokers had merged my information with my husband’s ex’s. Their logic was essentially: married to the same person = same person.

Which means that if someone associated with her committed a crime, it could have landed on my record.

And that record could then be fed into a system like ELITE.

The second piece, ICE’s Facial Recognition App Misidentified a Woman. Twice, reinforces the same problem from another angle. Mobile Fortify — another tool being used in the field — is clearly not operating on clean or reliable data either.

This is where the digital world stops being abstract.

We’ve talked about data brokers before. We’ve talked about fraud, hacking, spam, phishing, and identity theft. But I want to make something very clear:

Bad data can affect your physical safety.

And the work to reduce that risk has to happen before it feels urgent.

Not later.
Not “when there’s time.”
(Pro tip: there is never time.)

If you haven’t already, start reducing your data footprint now.

I thought you’d never ask. One of the hardest parts of preparation, digital or otherwise, is that it has to happen before the pressure is on.

Passwords.
Account recovery info.
Privacy settings.
Backups.

These are things you want handled ahead of time, not during stress, confusion, or limited access.

That’s why we’re opening Tea Time.

Tea Time is a weekly digital co-working space where you set aside time and work through the things you already know matter, alongside other people doing the same, with calm guidance from CybersecuriTea when a setting is buried three menus deep.

We’re not doing it for you.
This isn’t tech support.

It’s a structured space to turn “I should do this” into done.

We start Wednesday, January 28.
You can learn more and sign up here:

January happened. Now’s the time.

CybersecuriTea is a free, plain-English guide to digital safety, designed for families, friends, and the folks you love. Subscribe today and get weekly tips to help keep your digital life secure.

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