Every day, we happily and freely export the texture of our lives to the cloud via our chief stenographer, the smartphone. You’re not just writing emails and texting close friends. You’re writing to everyone: loose federations of group chats; your neighbors on WhatsApp and Facebook; acquaintances in Instagram DMs; prospects on ­dating apps; co-workers on Slack. You’re typing into Search, Notes, Venmo. Realizing your trove exists is terrifying. So is learning that it’s never been more vulnerable. Cybercrime is rising at harrowing rates. It can also become exposed to the public through explicitly legal means. You don’t need to be the target of litigation yourself to find your private conversations suddenly available to a wider audience: see the 2025 lawsuit filed by Elon Musk against Sam Altman and OpenAI, which exposed more than a decade of group chats and emails between some of the world’s richest men, squabbling over their personal financial stakes in the fate of humankind. It could be your coworker, your friend, your family member — why else would texts from Matt Damon’s wife, non-famous person Luciana Damon, become a matter of public record? She can thank Blake Lively for suing Justin Baldoni and dragging her iMessage history into discovery. Most of us, however, no matter how seemingly unimportant, conduct ourselves differently in public than we do in the digital realm, our version of behind closed doors. The problem now is that this private self has been recorded in your trove. Its very existence, and the sheer volume of its contents, means it could be useful, interesting, compromising, or lucrative to someone, somewhere, given the right set of circumstances. For our Cover Story, Bridget Read reports on how hacks, lawsuits, and data breaches are increasingly exposing our digital records — threatening to spill everything into the public: nymag.visitlink.me/CGzkMh