Steal Yourself Back

Your data is being sold. Your attention is being auctioned. Your money and time are disappearing into systems designed to take them. What are you going to do about it?

In 1971, Abbie Hoffman published Steal This Book, a countercultural guide to getting what you needed from a system he believed was rigged against you.

More than half a century later, the direction of the theft has reversed.

Your phone reports where you go. Data brokers assemble profiles from your purchases, searches, movements, and personal relationships. Social media platforms compete for your attention using techniques borrowed from behavioral psychology. Facial recognition can turn an ordinary photograph into a tool for identification. And checkout screens, subscriptions, fees, and deliberately confusing choices can make it harder to keep control of your own money.

You don’t have to accept this as the price of modern life.

Steal Yourself Back is a practical, evidence-minded guide to understanding how these systems work—and how to push back without breaking the law.

Inside, you’ll explore:

• The data-broker economy: How fragments of everyday life become personal profiles, who buys them, and why deleting a single account is rarely enough.
• The attention economy: How feeds, notifications, variable rewards, and engagement-driven design compete for your time—and how to change your environment instead of relying on willpower alone.
• Biometrics and surveillance: Why your face and voice create special privacy risks, what makes biometric information different from a password, and how to think carefully before enrolling in another identification system.
• Legal privacy tradecraft: Practical ways to reduce unnecessary data collection, separate identities and contact channels where appropriate, review permissions, and make your digital footprint less useful to bulk collectors.
• Consumer friction and money leaks: How defaults, recurring charges, confusing choices, and small financial drains can take more from you than you realize.
• The limits of individual action: Why your privacy can be exposed through family, friends, workplaces, schools, and public spaces—and why collective action matters.

This is not a guide to hacking accounts, evading lawful processes, or making yourself magically invisible. It draws a clear line between illegal shortcuts and lawful, repeatable defenses. Its goal is not to promise perfect anonymity, but to make routine extraction more difficult, reduce avoidable exposure, and help you make informed choices about the systems you use.

The book moves from understanding the problem to choosing practical defenses, then expands the fight beyond the individual. It asks you to look at the machinery behind everyday inconveniences, identify what matters most to protect, and take manageable steps that can add up over time.

You do not need to be a cybersecurity professional, a privacy activist, or a technology expert to begin. You need a willingness to question the defaults, examine the evidence, and stop treating every loss of control as a personal failure.

The answer isn’t simply to try harder.

It’s to understand the system, change the setup, and take back what you can—one deliberate move at a time.

You don’t have to disappear to become harder to exploit. You have to start taking yourself back.