Techniques are provided for securely routing network traffic data. A kernel routine in a computing device obtains content metadata from the network traffic data associated with an application. The kernel routine can evaluate the content metadata and determine whether security and privacy policies should be applied to the network traffic data associated with the content metadata. The kernel routine can automatically create or identify tags for the content metadata based on intent and context information that is determined by the kernel routine. The tags can be associated with particular security and privacy policies, such as anonymization and encryption.