How Your Private Data Is Packaged, Sold, and Deployed to Target You | Joe Weil

American Thought Leaders

The Epoch Times

Government, News, Politics

4.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You know the feature of the phone where it'll, the accelerometer will determine if you're holding it portrait or landscape to how you want to read an article?
0:07.0	Just that signal, which is available to every app all the time, tells a data harvester, is yawn moving, is yawn laying down, is yawn in a car, is yon exercising?
0:17.0	What's happening is the app, even when it's not being used, is sending off this information to a data harvester who is selling that to a data broker.
0:24.7	Today I sit down with Joe Weil, CEO of Unplugged.
0:28.2	We explore how smartphones quietly track our every move and how that data can be purchased
0:33.7	and used to build detailed profiles of individual people.
0:36.6	And this is just publicly available?
0:38.8	It's publicly available. It's purchasable.
0:41.3	So yes, anyone can do it.
0:42.8	Criminals can do it, private investigators can do it,
0:44.8	advertisers can do it, the CCP can do it, our own government can do it.
0:48.3	While calls out Apple and Google as key players in this data economy,
0:52.3	explains how unplugged aims to give users real control
0:56.3	with a privacy-first smartphone.
0:58.3	This is a national security issue.
1:00.7	It's an economic issue.
1:02.2	It's a cultural issue.
1:03.5	It's a civil liberties issue.
1:05.2	A revealing look at what your phone really knows.
1:08.3	This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kellick.
1:13.0	Joe Weil, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
1:16.7	Thank you, Jan. It's a pleasure to be here.
	...

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