The Secrets of Data Brokers—And What They Know About You | Joe Weil

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Most Americans have little understanding of the incredible amount of private data that is harvested from their smartphones by third parties, says Joe Weil, a former Apple product manager and founder of Unplugged.

Where you go, who you associate with, what you like is all easily discoverable, Weil says. “It’s publicly available. It's purchasable,” he says.

What’s even worse is that this advertising data is not protected by the Fourth Amendment, he says. The US government, for example, does not require warrants to access it.

Data brokers sell this data freely, and just by applying a few filters, anyone—foreign governments, intelligence services, criminal cartels—can easily triangulate the data to surveil and target individual people or groups of people.

“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,” Weil said.

Weil worked for ten years at Apple in product strategy before he founded Unplugged in 2025 - a high-tech company has built a smartphone specifically 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.

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