Trevor Timm is the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Below he writes about the Knight News Challenge on Data, a call for ideas based on the question, How might we make data work for individuals and communities? Winners will share in $3 million. Apply at newschallenge.org.

At the backdrop of Knight Foundation’s announcement of their exciting new News Challenge is a growing debate in newsrooms about data. This time, the debate is not about the data sets produced by others used to craft stories, or the journalists who write them, but about the personal information newsrooms and their partners collect on their own readers to serve advertisements.

While we can expect many entries in this year’s challenge will figure out better ways to analyze and visualize hidden meanings from large data sets, I also hope there will be others that will look at the question from the opposite angle: How do newsrooms reduce and minimize all the invasive data they vacuum in from their readers while still finding a way to bring in revenue so they can continue to produce quality journalism?

“Data for individuals and communities” is often at tension, and what’s good for one might not be good for the other. Where analyzing large data sets could be very useful for communities—just look at how attempts by The Washington Post and the Guardian to track the number of unarmed Americans killed by police has bolstered the #BlackLivesMatter movement; individuals may want their own private information to be far less available and up for analysis than the government data sets that should (of course) be public.

The rapid rise of ad blockers has caused major hand-wringing in many newsrooms in recent months. Sites now put up banner ads imploring users to make exceptions for their sites, some of them seem scolding of readers for reading free content without the ads. The Washington Post even briefly experimented with blocking users who refused to do so. Many have complained that if readers want to read the news for free, they should be happy to view the ads as well.

But for users, it’s much more of a trade-off between “seeing ads” and “getting free content.” As American Civil Liberties Union principal technologist Chris Soghoian wrote recently, third-party advertisements “consume your bandwidth & battery, slow your devices, track you everywhere you go, and expose you to malware. They’re parasites.”

Front-page stories have revealed the horror stories of large, once-private data sets being made public—whether it’s the recent hack of millions of government workers, Ashley Madison, or the hundreds of millions of credit card numbers that have been compromised over the last year.

The shady data brokers and advertising companies that track us all over the Web haven’t had their big data breach scandal yet. But just wait. When it happens, a data breach of a major online advertising network will make these other scandals look like nothing. Rather than exposing credit card numbers or mailing addresses, a data breach on an advertising network could include records of online transactions, Web browsing histories such as which news sites a person visited and when.

This is the data problem that individuals are increasingly faced with: Countless corporations—not just Google and Facebook—hold vast databases containing our most private secrets, and those secrets are only as private as their weakest point of security, which in many cases is not much at all. Data brokers will tell you this information is “anonymized” but study after study has shown that with just a few “anonymous” data points, virtually anyone can be unmasked for the world to see.

Data security is how we make sure our data stays safe, and when it comes to data security, holding on to no data is the best security of all.

This Knight Challenge wants to “empower people to make decisions about their lives, their democracy and their communities” using data. Sometimes that means giving users back the the data they’ve already given away, and keeping it out of the hands of third parties who can do things with it, including mine it, sell it and exploit it.

So in addition to all the amazing submissions I’m sure Knight will receive on how we analyze and visualize more data, I hope they also get just as many innovative solutions for how newsrooms and advertisers can do what they do, but with far less.

Knight Foundation is collaborating on the Knight News Challenge on Data with Data & Society and Open Society Foundations. Apply and give feedback on other projects at newschallenge.org. Winners will be announced in January 2016.