Chapter 8 — They Know You Better Than You Do
There is a file on you. It is for sale. You have never seen it.
Last chapter, the phone held your attention. This chapter is what it was doing while it held you.
It was taking notes.
The principle
There is a detailed file on you. You did not write it. You have never seen it. You cannot correct it. And it is for sale, right now, to nearly anyone who wants it.
The parallel — the target package
Before any serious operation against a target, someone builds what the military calls a target package. It is not a name and a photograph. It is a life: where the target goes and when, the route they drive, who they talk to, what they buy, what they fear, what they owe, when they are tired, when they are alone. The purpose of a target package is single and simple — to know the target better than the target knows themselves. Because a person you understand that completely is a person you can predict, and a person you can predict is a person you can move.
Hold that definition. Now I will tell you that a target package exists on you — on nearly every adult in this country. It is built, around the clock, by an industry most people have never heard of, and that industry carries a bland, forgettable name on purpose. They are called data brokers. The name is boring so that you will not look. What they build is not boring at all.
What is in the file, and who has it
Start with what goes in. Not just the obvious — your name, your address. Every app you open, every site you visit, every search you type, every loyalty card you swipe, every location your phone quietly reports. It is collected, bundled, and matched into one profile.
The scale is hard to hold in your head, so here is a real one. When the Federal Trade Commission studied this industry, it found a single data broker holding seven hundred billion individual data elements — and another one adding three billion new data points every month. One large broker was reported, more than a decade ago, to keep around fifteen hundred separate facts on a typical American. Fifteen hundred — and a file like that does not shrink with age. It only grows.
Who has it? Companies you have never heard of and never did business with. Nobody knows exactly how many — there is no honest count — but state registries run from several hundred into the high hundreds. And who buys it? Here you need it concrete, not abstract. Yes, advertisers. But the file is cheap, and it sells wide. In 2023, researchers at Duke University set out to test exactly this. They simply bought detailed records on roughly forty-five thousand active-duty U.S. servicemembers — names, home addresses, health information, finances, religion, the names of their children — from data brokers, on the open market, for as little as twelve cents a person.
Twelve cents. For a soldier’s home address and the names of his kids.
What it is actually for
Keep proportion here, because this book does not deal in panic. Most of the time, nobody is sitting in a dark room reading your file like a diary. It is automated. Most of it is used, dully, to sell you things.
But “most of the time” is not the danger. The danger is this: the same file that aims an advertisement can aim anything else. It can aim a scam that already knows your dog’s name. It can aim a manipulation built around the exact thing you are afraid of. And it can aim a person. In 2021, location data — bought on the open commercial market, the same market that sells the advertising data — was used to track one specific man’s phone to specific buildings, identify him, and end his career. That was not a spy agency. That was a file, for sale, used exactly as designed.
And the reach of all this is not some corner of your life. It is most of it. In a study of the top one million websites, researchers found a single company’s trackers present on roughly three out of every four of them. You are being measured almost everywhere you go.
You cannot delete the file. You can starve it.
So here is the honest part, and then the work. You cannot make this go away. I am not going to promise you a magic button that erases your file, because there is not one. The brokers have what they already have.
But a target package has a weakness: it goes stale. It is only valuable if it stays current and complete — and that you can attack. Every permission you take away, every tracker you block, every opt-out you file makes your package thinner, older, and less reliable. You are not erasing the file. You are starving it — and a starved file is a poor weapon. (It is also, as you will see much later in this book, exactly the kind of tedious, repetitive cleanup the right tool can do for you, at scale. Hold that thought.)
Make it actionable
DRILL — STARVE THE FILE
Audit your app permissions. Go through your phone’s apps and, for each, ask one question: does this app truly need this? A flashlight app does not need your location. A game does not need your contacts. Turn off everything that is not genuinely necessary — especially location, microphone, contacts, and photos.
Turn off the advertising ID. Your phone has a setting that lets advertisers follow you from app to app. Find it (search your settings for “ad” or “tracking”) and shut it off.
File the opt-outs. In many states, the largest data brokers are legally required to let you opt out. It is tedious. Do the big ones — or use a reputable removal service that does it for you.
Where this goes
That is the file. But knowing you that completely is not the end of anything — it is the ammunition. The next chapter is about the weapon it loads: an entire industry built, from its very first day, to move you. And that industry is far older than the internet.