Most Americans have little understanding of the vast amount of private data harvested from their smartphones by third parties, said Joe Weil, a former Apple product manager and the founder of Unplugged. Where you go, who you associate with, what you like, is all easily discoverable, Weil said. “It’s publicly available. It’s purchasable.” What’s even worse is that the Fourth Amendment does not protect this advertising data, he said. The U.S. government, for example, does not require a warrant to access it. Data brokers sell this data freely, and by applying just a few filters, anyone—foreign governments, intelligence services, criminal cartels—can easily triangulate it to surveil and target individual people or groups, Weil said. “We can’t do [surveillance] in China. They can do it here, and it’s a huge vulnerability. They can easily find the people they want to take off the board—it’s mapped out from our phones,” he said. Weil worked for 10 years at Apple in product strategy before founding Unplugged, a tech company that has built a smartphone designed to block tracking, data harvesting, and behavioral profiling at the system level. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
