Why the Total Dossier on Everybody Must Stop

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Todd Weaver

Founder and CEO
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Latest posts by Todd Weaver (see all)

• Hardware Encrypted COMSEC Bundle by Purism - April 29, 2024
• Purism Differentiator Series, Part 14: Surveillance Capitalism - April 23, 2024
• Purism Differentiator Series, Part 13: Modularity & Right to Repair - April 23, 2024

Where people go, what people do, and who talks to whom, should be kept private.

There is a total dossier on everybody, and you are likely a willing, yet oppressed, participant. Willing because of how convenient it is; oppressed, because everything you do is under the complete control of others.

Gang-stalking by corporations must stop. We have seen before what can happen when all the whereabouts of all people are tracked. The German Secret Police (the Stasi) had over 250,000 spies, who served in a four-decade long despotic regime over a population of 17 million, committing crimes against their own people–crimes that were viewed to be as brutal as those perpetrated by their Nazi predecessors–reminds us what oppression is. We have seen what happens when your privacy is invaded, when what you do is tracked. Decades before the Stasi, the Gestapo had 40,000 spies watching over a country of over 80 million, committing the worst atrocities on civilians ever; this is what oppression is.

We have seen what happens when who talks to whom turns into a demagogic tragedy. McCarthyism was coined from recklessly slandering public figures, ruining the lives of hundreds of US citizen with unsubstantiated accusations; this is what repression is.

The amount of data gathered on people from any of the aforementioned organizations is infinitesimally small, when compared to the astronomically large, nearly incomprehensible amount of personal data gathered from your mobile phone in just one day.

Where you go is known with satellite-measured accuracy, within a meter of your position on earth. Polling every millisecond–even when offline, for later synchronizing–your exact location is recorded at every moment of every day, permanently. What floor you’re on, who you are near, how long you’re near them, what speed you’re traveling at, who you’re traveling with, are all elementary level mathematics to establish. Cross-linking a single data point like your longitude and latitude to a second data point like the radio distance to a cellular tower or three, adding in what Wi-Fi you connect to and the strength of connection, makes confirming your location in triplicate extremely easy.

What you do is matched against where you go, how long you are there, and how much you interact with your phone or health monitoring app. Knowing you’re at an event, bar, game, restaurant, hotel or friends house is matched against photos, videos, social media posts, chats, heart rate–or simply how often you look at your phone–and can determine what you’re doing with a remarkable degree of accuracy. Were you bored or engaged? Were you hungry, or did the salad you paid for suffice until the after-dinner pizza you had delivered late-night, after your ride-share (aka taxi+tracking) service dropped you off at 11:04pm?

Who talks with whom is egregiously recorded forever, and in nearly all cases what is said to whom is also flagrantly squirreled away for eternity. You chatting with your mother–yep, spied on. You texting your spouse–spied on. You calling to cancel cable–spied on. Your photo sent to your colleague–spied on. It’s easier to list all the things kept between just you and the intended recipient, because it is absolutely nothing. There is no app that can guarantee it’s just two people involved in a text string; because apps, the underlying operating systems, and the underlying cellular networks, are controlled by the very same groups that surveil all of society.

Your oppression is not entirely your fault; knowledge is purposefully and behaviorally restricted from your purview.

It’s either buried in the hundredth paragraph of a terms-of-service you didn’t read, or shrouded in enough mystery you follow the rest of the anchovies in a collective experiment wondering “if it is this bad, why hasn’t anybody stopped it?”

It takes any one of three things to solve this–as history has shown: governments regulating to benefit civilians; business models changing to respect society; people switching to products and services that are ethical for society. Surveillance companies are working daily to remove the last one from happening; people switching requires a network effect, and they put up anti-competitive barriers for any new competition to have a level playing field. These same companies–all Big Tech companies–are so gargantuan that they don’t have to change their business practices toward helping society; they opt to use marketing slogans to keep their oppressive regimes dominating instead.

This leaves governments to step in and consider regulating the behemoths–never forgetting that lobbying efforts will work hard to adding regulation that keeps the companies gigantic, rather than regulation that benefits civilians, since this type of regulation makes smaller but growing competition need to jump higher and higher to vault over the new regulatory hurdle.

To rid yourself of the unethical dossier collected on you takes having a (convenient) alternative that avoids knowing where people go, what people do, who talks to whom, all it takes is governments to stand up and regulate to benefit its civilians.

And most importantly, it takes you leading by example, using products designed to respect your rights.