You're Paying for Your Own Surveillance. Stop.

How data brokers turned your apps into informants

You’re Paying for Your Own Surveillance. Stop.

how data brokers turned your apps into informants

Hi you,

I really don't want to fund fascism. And it's really hard to stop, especially when you start to realize just how many ways you're doing it without noticing.

The weather app on my phone is selling my location to a data broker. The game I play to decompress is feeding my GPS coordinates into a pipeline that ends at federal immigration enforcement. The tools we use every day are feeding our data into a $200 billion industry that compiles, packages, and sells us to whoever’s buying. Hundreds of millions of phones. Billions of data points, updated daily.

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One of those customers: The U.S. Federal Government. Congress is voting this week to let the government surveil us with ChatGPT. Call 202-952-1892 and tell Congress “vote NO on FISA until the data broker loophole is closed.”

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This isn’t a hypothetical. In September 2025, ICE purchased access to a surveillance tool called Webloc. Officials can draw a shape on a map and see every phone that’s been in that area. Click on any one of those phones. Watch where it goes. ICE doesn’t think it needs a warrant for any of this, because the data was “voluntarily disclosed” through apps. Ain’t that something.

And none of this should be surprising to anyone. Black communities, immigrant rights organizations, Muslim Americans after 9/11, Indigenous communities fighting for data sovereignty: they’ve been naming this exact pattern for years. Surveillance gets tested on the vulnerable, then expanded to everyone. First it’s those people. Then it’s your neighborhood.

In my new video, I get into all of this, including what I’m actually doing about it, where I’m stuck (email is a monster, I’m not ready), and a four-part framework that’s much bigger than “Defund Fascism” and is more like “How To Create The Society We Deserve.”

The four levers:

1. Shrink your exposure

Reduce what your devices can learn, store, and leak about you. The less it knows, the less it can snitch. Audit the apps on your phone. Audit the digital relationships extracting from you. Delete the games. Lock down the location permissions. Use a privacy-respecting browser. The point isn’t paranoia. The point is to stop volunteering data into a pipeline that gets sold to people who’d use it against you or your neighbor.

2. Reclaim your DAM

Data. Attention. Money. Three things every platform wants from you. Pull all three back from the companies undermining our ability to live well together.

A subscription is a vote. Every monthly payment is a signal, and right now a lot of our money is voting for things our values would never endorse. Scott Galloway’s Resist and Unsubscribe has been documenting his own cancellations publicly. Beyond the Ballot’s Ice Out of My Wallet gets granular about specific company contracts. Boycott Citizensmaintains a research index of companies tied to ICE.

3. Fund what serves you

This is the part most people skip. Cancellation alone leaves a vacuum. Replacement fills it. Co-ops. Local shops. Tools that respect your privacy. Creators and platforms that don’t require your subjugation to exist. Pay for the things you want to see more of in the world.

I think of this as planting seeds, not flags. Flags claim territory. Seeds grow.

4. Take collective action

Individual consumer choices alone will not build the world we deserve. We have to move from being transactional consumers to active citizens. Citizen as a verb. No immigration status required. This is how we show up with and for each other to set the rules together, to create the conditions together, and to hold these companies accountable together.

That might look like organizing for fiber in your neighborhood. It might mean pushing for actual regulation on data brokers and ICE contracts. It might mean joining one of the campaigns already doing this work.

You don’t have to pull all four. I certainly am not. But if a hundred things need to happen and you do five, that’s better than zero. And if we all do five, that adds up to way more than a hundred.

Big credit to Dr. Avriel Epps, who has been de-Googling her life in public and reframed this for me as harm reduction, not perfection. And to YK Hong, whose Decolonize Digital toolbox is one of the most useful resource hubs out there for anyone starting this work.

In my new video I get into all of this with more detail, including the parts I’m still struggling with and the parts that have been weirdly fun.

Watch the video here →

Then come back and tell me: what are you trying to leave? What’s been hard? Where have you been successful?

We are SO CLOSE to winning a Webby for our show, specifically for our use of AI. Voting closing end of day April 16th. VOTE HERE

Solidarity is not a solo operation.

Stay free,

Baratunde

Thanks to the Life With Machines team and Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.