Let’s get something straight. You don’t own your data. You don’t even own the choices you make. Big Tech does. Every move you make, every thought you have, every little bit of hesitation before you click “Accept Cookies”, is logged, stored, analyzed, is ultimately turned against you.
Big Tech built an empire on your digital breadcrumbs, my smart friend, and you paid for it with your identity. And your preferences, your personality, your secret 2 AM Google searches, are all exploited, packaged, and sold to the highest bidder.
And the best part is that you agreed to all of this.
More rants after the commercial brake:
- Comment, or share the article; that will really help spread the word 🙌
- Connect with me on Linkedin 🙏
- Subscribe to TechTonic Shifts to get your daily dose of tech 📰
Marc, our favorite digital grand dad
Marc Drees, we all know him as the ever-so-dark and cynical blogger for RecruitmentMatters, woke up to the gentle vibration of his smartphone alarm (old-style Nokia ringtone), which had been tracking his snoring patterns all night.
And like any “modern” man who is determined to stay relevant, he reached for his phone and started his morning’s doomscroll. Instagram greeted him with a flood of irrelevant ads and baby pictures from distant relatives, but something caught his eye. . . . an ad for a walker! Marc hadn’t searched for one, but he had been complaining about his hip to a friend yesterday evening. He stayed on the ad for just a second too long. That was all it took. Just milliseconds, to record, analyze, and send that action into the data marketplace, where advertisers drooled over the chance to target an aging man clinging to his mobility.
Later that morning, Marc shuffled to his one-man tech recruitment office, where he prided himself on being ahead of the game, at least, in his own mind, but in reality, he spent half his time calling his grandkids for IT support. His phone buzzed with a notification: “Great deals on ergonomic chairs for home offices!”
Was it a coincidence?
Not quite.
His recent Google searches for “best walker for cobblestone streets” had been neatly packaged, categorized, and sold to an ad exchange, that flagged him as a prime target for “senior mobility solutions”. Of course, his dignity made him dismiss the ad, but the internet had already decided his fate, that he was old, fragile, and in desperate need of better seating.
At lunch, he visited his usual café for a couple of whiskeys, but his phone’s GPS betrayed him.
That afternoon, while he was scrolling Facebook between the few work emails he gets every day, he saw a post about a new café in town. It had no likes, no comments, but somehow it appeared at the top of his feed.
He didn’t remember searching for bars, but he had visited a different place last week. Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe not. Either way, he caught himself thinking about trying it, exactly as intended. The ad wasn’t screaming for his attention though. It was more subtle. It nudged him along, and made it seem like his own idea. Meanwhile, his feed had been hijacked by AI-generated content, which was perfectly calibrated to keep him scrolling, and consuming.
As he tried booking a flight to a boring tech conference that evening – the one last attempt to stay relevant – his email exploded with travel ads.
Airlines, hotels, and insurance companies all seemed to know that he was planning a trip, and they flooded his inbox with “exclusive deals” before he even had a chance to hit confirm. His bank flagged the transaction, his insurance company adjusted his policy, and somewhere in the digital underbelly, his personal data was sold to network where all were profiting from his next move.
As he finally sat down to relieve his ol’ bones, Netflix recommended a documentary that was eerily close to his latest YouTube search. He sighed, and he realized that no matter how hard he tried to keep up with the digital world, technology always had him by the tail.
He knew that he wasn’t a customer. He was inventory. Every click, every scroll got captured, and sold.
The lie of “smart” technology
You think AI is making your life easier?
Uh-huh.
You think your phone is just a tool?
Awww.
No. What you have in your pocket is an all-seeing, ever-learning, corporate-owned narc that has been taking notes since the moment you unboxed it.
Every app, every website, every desperate search for “how to pretend sick to my boss” has been recorded. And not just by Google. No, no, your data passes through an entire underworld of brokers, algorithms, and faceless corporations that hoard digital profiles.
That email you never sent? Stored and indexed. That rant you deleted? Kept. That time you drunkenly whispered into your phone about quitting your marriage? Oh, they flagged that one.
Tech companies want you to believe that the tech – your phone, your apps, your AI – is just a super-powered butler, fetching you recommendations, making your life smoother.
Here’s the truth.
Tech ain’t serving you.
It’s dissecting you.
What data is being collected?
When you use a smartphone or any other connected device there’s a lot of data being collected. It’s just staggering. Clicks, messages, transactions – they all generate information. But it doesn’t stop there. Even what you think are private moments, like your voice, emotions, or location, are tracked, stored, and analyzed.
And much of this data is then sold to the highest bidder. Yes, also your mobile phone usage. This lets tech companies and third-party advertisers profit off your every move.
Here’s a look at some of the types of data being collected:
Voice data
Voice assistants like the limp Siri, stottering Alexa, and the demented Google Assistant are constantly listening in. Even when you are not actively using them. Not only is what you say being recorded, but the tone of your voice and even emotional nuances are also analyzed. This means that AI systems can detect if you’re happy, stressed, angry, or ever so confused as Marc is when he wrestles with new tech. The tech behind this is increasingly sophisticated, and companies like Amazon, Facebook, TikTok and Google are using it to tailor responses and product recommendations.
Amazon has allowed employees to listen to recordings made by Alexa users in order to improve voice recognition technology, and Apple did the same. A few months ago, they were ordered to pay $95M to users for Siri’s secret recordings. Ok, they didn’t sell them – that is not yet – but this is a blatant invasion of your privacy.
But what I think is even more concerning, is that voice recordings are stored and sold to third parties for targeted advertising or to train machine learning models.
Da whatnow?!
🤬
Yup, the one who is most actively selling your conversational data is Meta – and that rhymes for a reason.
You probably know that the apps on your phone have access to your microphone.
But the thing is that it happens often without you realizing it. Facebook is listening in on private conversations through the microphone permissions you “accidentally” granted it when you installed the app.
I experienced this firsthand.
I was talking about how much I’d love to own a camper, the freedom it would give me, the adventures I’d go on. And within a day, my Facebook feed was all over the place with campervan ads.
Was that coincidence? At first I thought so, but fortunately, the ads were so obviously intrusive that it sent my alarm bells ringing. A little research confirmed what I suspected, and it showed me that Facebook has the microphone on by default, actively listens, and sells this information to advertisers willing to pay for it.
And Facebook isn’t alone in this.
Ever played with a free app?
Those harmless little things?
Well, they’re some of the worst offenders.
Games, photo editors, even flashlight apps.
Many of them have no real reason to access your microphone, yet they request the permission anyway. And once you grant them access, they can listen anytime, and pick up snippets of your conversation with other people, and even nearby TV shows or music. This data gets fed into massive advertising databases which allow for companies to build an even more detailed profile of you. Many people never check their app permissions, and that means they have no idea how much of their private life is being siphoned off and sold.
Biometric data
This is a bit more than fingerprints or facial recognition. Devices track a range of biometric data through sensors that are embedded in your smartphones, your watch, and also your smart home devices. It tracks your heart rate, sleep patterns, movement (how Marc walks – his gauge, or crooked gesture), and even facial expressions can be captured. For instance, Apple Watch can track your heart rate and physical activity, and Fitbit monitors everything from your step count to your stress levels.
Now, this data is often used to personalize experiences, like adjusting music based on your mood or offering you fitness recommendations.
However, companies also use (or sell) this biometric information to third parties for ad targeting. For instance, Apple could use your health data for app suggestions or recommendations in App Store ads, Apple News, or Apple Fitness+. And Google can use fitness data through their acquisition of Fitbit and Android, to influence ads across its platforms. Think of Google Search, YouTube, and Google Display Network, based on health-related interests.
Location data
Location tracking is one of the most invasive forms of data collection. Even if you disable location services on your phone, the apps can still track your movements by using other sensors, like Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth and yes, even GPS!
Your exact whereabouts are monitored and stored, and that creates a detailed record of your whereabouts. Google, Facebook, and other companies often collect location data for ad targeting or to build behavioral profiles.
And the most scary thing of all is that your location history can be sold or shared with advertisers, or it can be used to predict future actions (e.g., where you might travel next, where you spend the most time, what goods are for sale nearby, etc.).
Google and Facebook have been accused of using location information to personalize ads. Even Uber tracks where you go for the sole purpose of optimizing its service and making strategic business decisions. Advertisers use Google’s platform to target users based on their location, and browsing patterns. And by doing this they made over $200 billion in ad revenue from the data they collect.
Behavioral data
Every time that you play with an app, a website, or a platform, a digital footprint is left behind. Think about the trail of clicks, scrolls, likes, shares, comments, and time spent on a website every time you visit a page.
These actions are then analyzed to determine your preferences, and habits, and over time, they use this information to build a psychographic profile of you.
Yes – you read that correct – they are profiling you.
Your tastes, desires, political views, heck – I am sure they can even diagnose if you’re a serial killer and predict where you’ll hide your next body.
The data also lets them nudge you toward specific behaviors. So they might serve you particular content, or a specific context matching advertisement. And of course, this behavioral data is sold to advertisers as well who want to target you more effectively.
Facebook of course, is a repeat offender.
You might recall one of their most controversial scandals in 2018: The Cambridge Analytica scandal. Facebook thought it was a splendid idea to let a British consulting firm harvest data from millions of users without consent, to create hyper-targeted political ads for Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. C.A. said that they were “pivotal” in Trumps’ first election victory. Anyway, this blatant abuse of user data and trust led to one of the largest fines ever, of $5 billion, by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. You’d think they’d learn from this, but nah, in 2024 Meta collected biometric data (like facial recognition) without our consent, it came out and they had to pay a $1,5 billion fine in a settlement in Texas.
Social data
Tech companies are also tracking your social interactions. That is about, who you communicate with, and how often, or even the context of these interactions. They use social media platforms (like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram) and messaging apps (like WhatsApp), to collect data on your relationships – who you talk to, what you share, and the kinds of conversations you engage in.
They track sentiment analysis to test the waters on how you feel about certain people or topics. This information is used to refine ad targeting and to suggest new social connections or products. And, as is always the case with these things, this social data is sold to third-party firms who use it for market research, product development, or even voter influence (like, yes, Cambridge Analytica).
Your app usage is sold to the highest bidder
Many apps, and especially, the harmless or “free” apps, are integrated with ad networks that sell your app usage data to the party that pays the most. These apps track your every tap and every scroll, then package that data to sell it to advertisers who use it to target you with personalized ads.
Apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook can track your app usage, record how long you stay on a particular post, and use that data to serve you more ads. Even apparently innocent apps like Spotify or Google Maps track your moves to sell data to marketers. Uber tracks your rides and searches to personalize your experience and also selling that data for profit.
The truth is – and we all know that by now – that when you’re using these apps, you’re not their customer, you’re the product they’re selling. But what you probably didn’t know is the extent to what they collect.
And when those companies have collected your data, your profile, with all the information they have collected about you, goes into the real-time bidding machine through data-brokers.
Now, real-time bidding is a high-speed auction where your personal data is the prize.
The moment that you visit a website or open an app, a bidding war begins that you cannot see. Advertisers compete in milliseconds for the opportunity to target you based on your browsing history, preferences, policital stance, location, and even your mood. You never signed up for this. You never gave permission (well, you actually did, but who reads it anyway). But that doesn’t matter, because you’re just another data point in a massive, automated marketplace.
The biggest players in this gray circus are Google, Facebook, and Apple, and they rake in billions by selling your behavioral data through their ad networks.
But they are just the surface.
The real power is with data brokers, and those are the companies you have never heard of before, like Acxiom, Oracle Data Cloud, and Experian. Yes, also Oracle (software) and Experian (credit brokering).
They weren’t content with just being a software giant, and wanted a piece of the pie as well. Oracle bought Bluekai and Datalogix with which they have amassed 3 billion user profiles, and are tracking us across 15 million websites, and 1 billion mobile users to collect, analyze, and resell our digital footprint.
They gather everything from your shopping habits and social media activity to your exact GPS location and even medical history.
Then there are the RTB platforms, and they are the middlemen who are running these auctions in real-time. And in this domain, we have companies like AdColony, Magnite, and Smaato who act as the marketplaces where your data gets sold before you even realize it. These systems use AI to predict your next move, and that makes it easier for advertisers to steer your decisions, and influence your behavior.
T-Mobile Is Profiling You, Tracking You, and Selling You
Telecom providers have always had access to our data, but T-Mobile has taken surveillance to a whole new – and scary – level. The company has silently (without notifying its users) enabled “Profiling and Automated Decisions” by default. That means every single customer is automatically opted into a system that tracks and predicts their behavior, spending habits, and movements.
Yup.
Told you, it was scary.
This automated profiling analyzes your browsing and call history and it attempts to evaluate your work performance, economic situation, health status, reliability, and even personal preferences.
And if you think this came from a hallucinating AI, just read their privacy statement.
In other words, T-Mobile is running a predictive behavioral analysis on you, whether you asked for it or not. And unless you manually opt out, they will keep doing it indefinitely.
This isn’t the first time that T-Mobile has been reckless with user data. Back in 2021, they were caught sharing user data with advertisers without explicit consent.
In 2023, they suffered a major data breach, that exposed 37 million customers’ personal details, including names, billing addresses, and phone numbers. But, instead of tightening security and improving transparency, they’ve doubled down on collecting info and using it for more intrusive tracking mechanisms. They have now packaged it as AI-driven “customer insights”.
This means that every time you call customer service, visit a T-Mobile store, or even browse their app, an algorithm is running in the background, guessing what you’re about to do next.
And it gets worse.
T-Mobile uses this data internally, AND it is deeply engaged in data mining for profit.
The company has long been a using big data analytics to improve customer retention and optimize sales strategies, but their latest tactics are just crossing the line between predictive analytics and invasive surveillance.
T-Mobile’s predictive models track how often you experience dropped calls, how long you stay in a specific location, and who you communicate with most frequently. If their system detects that you’ve recently moved, it may preemptively offer you discounts or service upgrades, before you’ve even thought about switching carriers.
The fact that T-Mobile enabled this setting without any user notification, to me, is truly horrifying. They assume that most people won’t check their privacy settings, and they’re probably right. The only way to stop them from collecting this data is to manually turn off the profiling toggle through the T-Mobile privacy dashboard. But even that might not be enough, because once the data has been collected, it is often stored indefinitely, and used to refine future tracking models.
T-Mobile’s AI-driven insights are creating long-term digital profiles of customers that could influence everything from pricing strategies to how customer service agents interact with you.
The AI determines whether you qualify for certain promotions, adjust pricing based on your spending patterns, and even influence your eligibility for financial services. And once your profile is set, good luck changing it.
B’rds!
Your data never dies. It evolves into your digital ghost
Ever try to delete a social media account?
Yeah.
It’s nice how they let you think you’re erasing your data, like a little kid who is pretending to clean up their room by shoving Legos under the couch.
Your “deleted” information isn’t gone. It’s just sitting in some server, waiting to be repurposed.
The internet never forgets.
Your past selves are floating around in the dark underbelly of the internet somewhere, and some AI model is busy learning from them (not only DarkBert). That presentation about Scrooge mcDuck that I gave in 2011? Still there. That time I asked the internet if it’s normal to hate 90% of my coworkers? Stored.
Your “data footprint” isn’t a footprint. It’s a fossilized skeleton, and AI is the archaeologist, that is digging up every version of you, piecing together who you really are. And trust me, it knows you better than you know yourself.
If you want to know what the internet has on you, just check this website (or read this article: Look what I found on the dark web – a tool that your favorite stalker probably uses…. | LinkedIn)
The future will be decided by those who resist
The question is, what are you going to do about it?
No, you can’t go off-grid. No, you can’t escape. But you can fight back. You can encrypt your messages. You can use privacy-focused tools. You can mess with the algorithm by feeding it garbage data.
If you want to fight back, you need to start with the basics, and that is knowing your phone is a surveillance device that you willingly carry with you. But you can limit the damage.
Start by turning off location tracking in your settings, but don’t just rely on the toggle of your operating system, and go deeper into individual app permissions and shut them down.
Use a VPN to hide your IP address from advertisers. Switch your search engine to DuckDuckGo or Brave Search, because Google tracks everything you type, and even what you don’t. Ditch Chrome for Firefox or Brave, and load it up with uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger to block trackers. If you’re on mobile, use Bromite (Android) or Safari with lock-down mode (iPhone).
Your accounts are a goldmine of sellable data.
Delete whatever you don’t need. Go to JustDeleteMe and wipe old accounts (I have the Chrome extension, that’s handy). If you can’t delete something, at least go in and change your details – that is replace your real name with gibberish, use a burner email from 10MinuteMail or SimpleLogin.
Speaking of email, get off Gmail. They scan your messages. Use ProtonMail or Tutanota instead. And stop giving out your real phone number. Use MySudo for a throwaway number when signing up for things.
The algorithm predicts your next move before you make it. So break the cycle.
Mess with the data they collect on you. Spend a few days searching for random, unrelated things like alpaca farming, Viking funeral customs, DIY submarine building. Watch videos in languages you don’t speak. Click on ads for products that you’d never buy, then block them anyway. A cool tool to use for this is AdNauseam, that’s a browser extension that I’m running, that automatically clicks on every ad in the background, and that is drowning advertisers in useless data.
Social media is the biggest data parasite.
Minimize it or at least isolate it.
Don’t use Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok in your main browser. Open them in Firefox Focus, or in a private window. Block their tracking pixels with Facebook Container or Privacy Badger, or FB Purity (And never install this stuff from sites like Softonic). If you have to use WhatsApp, at least turn off cloud backups so your chats don’t end up stored indefinitely. Or better yet, switch to Signal, that is encrypted messaging with zero ads, no tracking, and no Meta lurking in the background.
At the end of the day, the goal isn’t complete invisibility, because that’s nearly impossible. The goal is to be too much of a hassle to track. Big Tech relies on the fact that most people don’t fight back. So start fighting. Become a tarpit yourself by making them waste time and money trying to pin you down. Use their own AI against them. The more unpredictable you become, the more useless their data hoards get. Make yourself a problem, because problems don’t get sold.
Signing off while Big Tech wants to figure out why I just searched for alpaca yoga retreats and nuclear physics in the same session.
Marco
Well, that’s a wrap for today. Tomorrow, I’ll have a fresh episode of TechTonic Shifts for you. If you enjoy my writing and want to support my work, feel free to buy me a coffee ♨️
Think a friend would enjoy this too? Share the newsletter and let them join the conversation. Google appreciates your likes by making my articles available to more readers.
To keep you doomscrolling 👇
- The AI kill switch. A PR stunt or a real solution? | LinkedIn
- ‘Doomsday clock’: it is 89 seconds to midnight | LinkedIn
- AIs dirty little secret. The human cost of ‘automated’ systems | LinkedIn
- Open-Source AI. How ‘open’ became a four-letter word | LinkedIn
- One project Stargate please. That’ll be $500 Billion, sir. Would you like a bag with that? | LinkedIn
- The Paris AI Action summit. 500 billion just for “ethical AI” | LinkedIn
- People are building Tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers | LinkedIn
- The first written warning about AI doom dates back to 1863 | LinkedIn
- How I quit chasing every AI trend (and finally got my sh** together) | LinkedIn
- The dark visitors lurking in your digital shadows | LinkedIn
- Understanding AI hallucinations | LinkedIn
- Sam’s glow-in-the-dark ambition | LinkedIn
- The $95 million apology for Siri’s secret recordings | LinkedIn
- Prediction: OpenAI will go public, and here comes the greedy shitshow | LinkedIn
- Devin the first “AI software engineer” is useless. | LinkedIn
- Self-replicating AI signals a dangerous new era | LinkedIn
- Bill says: only three jobs will survive | LinkedIn
- The AI forged in darkness | LinkedIn
Leave a Reply