You’re worth something. Here’s how to protect it 🛡️

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Five episodes. The companies monetizing your data, the brokers reselling it, the states watching you, the criminals preying on you, and the argument — « I’ve got nothing to hide » — that too often stands in the way of acting on any of it. The picture is complete.

One practical question remains: what do you do now?

This final episode doesn’t claim to make you invisible — nobody truly is in today’s digital world. The goal is more modest and more realistic: reduce your exposure where it matters most, with simple, accessible steps suited to daily life in Yaoundé, Douala, or anywhere else in Cameroon.

Secure your mobile money first 📱

We established it in Episode 4: mobile money is cybercriminals’ top target in Cameroon. That’s where to start.

Your PIN belongs to you alone. No MTN or Orange agent, no « representative » on the phone, will ever legitimately ask for it. If someone requests it — to « unblock » your account, « confirm » a transaction, or recover a « wrong transfer » — that’s a fraud attempt, full stop.

Always check your balance through your operator’s USSD code before acting on an SMS announcing a transaction. « Wrong transfer » scams rely precisely on you not verifying before sending money back.

Turn on transaction notifications if you haven’t already, and regularly review your account history for anything unusual.

If you’re a victim of fraud, change your PIN immediately, contact your operator’s official customer service, and report the incident to ANTIC via the toll-free line 8202, free and available 24/7 — a channel created specifically for this kind of reporting.

Basic digital habits 🔐

Three habits, simple to set up, significantly reduce your exposure.

Two-factor authentication (2FA) adds a verification step — usually a code sent by SMS or generated by an app — on top of your password. Turn it on for your most sensitive accounts: email, WhatsApp, social media. It won’t stop every hack, but it stops the vast majority of automated attempts.

Distinct passwords for each important service. Reusing the same password everywhere means a single data breach — at any service you use — exposes all your accounts. A password manager solves this without extra memorization effort.

Default suspicion toward unsolicited links and calls. A message creating urgency — blocked account, prize to claim, package waiting — is the most reliable warning sign. Verify the source through an independent channel before clicking or responding.

Reduce what you expose without realizing it 👁️

Beyond direct scams, there are habits that reduce the scope of your digital profile — what we described in Episode 1.

Check your app permissions. A flashlight app has no legitimate reason to access your contact list or your GPS location continuously. On both Android and iPhone, privacy settings let you review and revoke these permissions app by app.

Limit location sharing to apps that genuinely need it, and only while in use rather than continuously.

Adjust your social media visibility. Public information on Facebook or Instagram — birthdate, city, employer, photos of your home — is exactly what romance scammers use to build a credible profile, as documented in Episode 4.

What you can reasonably aim for — and what’s beyond your control 🎯

Let’s be honest about the limits of this episode. None of these measures protect you from a state determined to surveil you, or from a company collecting your data within the legal — if imperfect — bounds of its terms of service. What we described in Episodes 2 and 3 is largely a matter of structural decisions: regulation, international power dynamics, infrastructure choices.

What does depend on you is reducing your vulnerability to the actors most directly harmful to your daily life — the predators of Episode 4 — and exercising minimal but real control over what you expose without thinking.

It’s not much, against the scale of the system described in this series. It’s also, concretely, what separates most victims from most people who escape a scam.

What this series set out to do 🔥

What You’re Worth was never meant to alarm for the sake of alarm. It set out to make visible a system that works precisely because it stays invisible — for most of us, most of the time.

Your data has value. That value interests companies that monetize it, states that monitor it, and criminals that exploit it against you. Understanding this system is the first step toward navigating it with a measure of clarity — and, where possible, reclaiming some of the control that belongs to you.

💬 Join the conversation: After these six episodes, what has changed most in how you think about your personal data? What habits will you adopt — or have you already adopted? This series will keep living through your questions: don’t hesitate to ask them in the comments.

This article concludes What You’re Worth, TechGriot’s series on the personal data economy.