i was an avid reader as a kid, and into my teens, and at some point in my mid teens, maybe 16-17, i encountered William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson and John Shirley (of course, yes Phillip K Dick)

Bruce Sterling, in particular, wrote one notable book about data havens, Islands in the Net, but many of the books by the other authors sometimes touched on it, the famously cheesy Johnny Mnemonic is a whole short story themed around the subject of leaks, and the extraordinary effort that the corporations would go to to suppress the release of incriminating information.

Data havens are jurisdictions where there is some degree of privacy around information in general, it's usually the case that any place that respects the privacy of bank client information, so-called "tax havens" are often data havens, and sometimes this protection is general and sometimes it is reserved primarily for foreign nationals.

Switzerland, many of the carribean islands, including the dutch ones, the netherlands itself used to be more but since EU not so much... even Australia is more of a data haven than much of europe anymore. It seems to me like Portugal is also something of a data haven, at least especially the islands.

If you care about your privacy, and you want to be involved in building systems that protect people's privacy, you should probably seriously consider being in a data haven.

And in your work, you should try to avoid being directly involved in deploying privacy protection systems for other people, this should be a strict isolation because that also adds to the buffer zone you have that lets you know you might need to disappear to tajikistan or something.