I’m 17. It’s time kids and teens pushed for a safer internet.

Nothing generates conflict in my family as reliably as the Apple TV remote. Tirades, tears, tantrums — they all gush from that innocuous sliver of aluminum. Its sleek minimalism proves too complicated for my parents, whose Stretch Armstrong-chiseled fingers crave a deluge of buttons à la 2014. My siblings and I scoff at their indignation as our thumbs dance across Apple’s touch-pad with ease. Candy Crush trained them well.

The generational technology divide is real. For my parents, the mobile phone was weaved into the social fabric through decades of innovation. It was my generation’s baby blanket. We’ve grown up on screens: They’re our newspapers, our hand-scribbled letters. They’ve morphed our realities into technological impressionist paintings, composed of pixels and liquid crystals, becoming our cultural universal.

Pew Research reports that 95% of American teens have access to smartphones.

This stat invariably sparks important conversations about connection and information access, digital addiction and efficiency, cyberbullying and harassment — ones that are often considered in the public square and look to youth testimonies for answers.

But debate over another pressing issue of the digital age has no interest in the teenage experience, even though it should: Data privacy.

Data privacy talk has gained a technical and esoteric characterization. Privacy breaches, and the technocracy subsisting on them, only seem theoretically catastrophic, and data-collating technologies have practical value. Targeted advertising makes our lives easier. Algorithms streamline our time on the web. It can’t be likely that the NSA has interest in your Ancestry results. So why should we care?

Here, the generational schism strikes again. What look like hypotheticals to baby boomers, Gen Xers, and millennials are chronic threats to Gen Z, whose data have been tracked our whole lives.

Kidtech developer SuperAwesome says that more than 72 million pieces of a child’s personal data will have been collected by the age of 13. Internet marketing service Pixalate warns that 67% of the top 1,000 child-directed apps on the Apple and Google Play stores send user location and IP address information to the ad bidstream.

According to Human Rights Watch, 145 children’s educational products directly transmit user data to 196 third-party companies, mostly in the ad-tech industry. Meanwhile, child privacy regulations, like the 1998 Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), sit idly by, plagued by statutory shortcomings of their own.

Even though there is broad agreement among registered voters that new digital privacy legislation should be a congressional priority, national reforms have had trouble moving past referral to U.S. House and Senate subcommittees. Reasonably so. It’s bad strategy for a politician to wade through the polarized wasteland, opening themselves to attacks from tech giants and their national security BFFs, over such a dry issue. Time is money, so why not spend it on casework or politicking?

What data politics really needs is the zeal of those for whom stakes are high, for whom privacy is a personal issue: teenagers. This is our casework. We — the ones raised in a data mine, the cannon fodder in the digital war, the generation whose lives have been put online in both senses — are the emerging electorate. And that very simple fact confers on us vast power. It’s time we seek shelter from a draconian national security state feeding on our information. It’s time we strive for a safer Internet. It’s time we make data privacy a bona fide political issue.

All it takes is the courage to grab the remote and take the digital future into our own hands.