Data Fortress

Tonya Winton is a privacy researcher, technology ethicist, and the founder of *Digital Boundaries*, a consultancy that helps individuals and small businesses navigate the complexities of digital surveillance and data protection. With over fifteen years of experience in the cybersecurity space, Tonya has worked as a senior analyst for a nonprofit defending consumer privacy rights, where she authored influential reports on AI-driven ad profiling and government surveillance programs.

Her writing has appeared in *WIRED*, *The Guardian*, and *Ars Technica*, and she has been a featured speaker at the Chaos Communication Congress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Privacy Camp, and the RightsCon summit. Tonya holds a Master’s degree in Information Policy from the University of California, Berkeley, where her thesis examined the ethical implications of predictive policing algorithms.

When not decoding privacy policies or testing the latest anonymization tools, Tonya runs a small homestead in the Pacific Northwest, where she raises chickens and experiments with off-grid networking to prove that a low-surveillance lifestyle is both possible and rewarding. *Data Fortress* is her first book, born from years of teaching friends and family how to protect themselves from a digital world that often forgets they are human. She believes that privacy is not a luxury—it is a right worth fighting for, one setting at a time.