Imagine if every click we made, every step we took and even every heartbeat was silently sold to the highest bidder. It sounds like the plot of a George Orwell novel, but it is very much a reality that we have normalized.
The data on our Instagram, our Spotify and our fitness trackers are all sold to third parties. These include advertisers exploiting personal data to predict and shape behavior for profit or data brokers that create detailed, individual profiles.
Our smart TVs track all of our viewing habits.
Insurance companies will seek to buy your car’s data and may choose to raise your rates or terminate your coverage if your driving patterns give them an excuse to do so.
Our phones gather an astonishing amount of intimate data, including every place you have been, by pinging your location to location data companies.
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It is such a common condition of modern life that roughly 60% of United States adults say they do not think it is possible to go through daily life without having data collected about them by companies or the government.
But when that data includes your genetic code, the stakes get even higher.
The genetic testing company 23andMe allows its users to obtain a detailed analysis of their DNA by simply spitting in a tube. The company took the world by storm, peaking with over 15 million customers.
Fast-forward 10 years, and the biotech company is now filing for bankruptcy. Two weeks ago, 23andMe announced that it had already entered the federal bankruptcy process, hoping to find a buyer to tackle its financial troubles. Now, millions of users’ data are up for auction.
Many are concerned that 23andMe is misusing their data, and several news outlets and experts are warning 23andMe users to delete their accounts. However, some people — millennials and Gen Z in particular — seem not to care about a lack of data privacy, with anonymity being one of several reasons for such indifference. Yet, we see a striking lack of anonymity when companies collect people’s data.
In 2019, The New York Times Privacy Project, the news outlet’s initiative delving into the evolving landscape of digital age privacy, released an investigative piece into the practice of location data companies. The newspaper obtained a data file from one company that held more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of over 12 million Americans.
To evaluate such company’s promises of anonymity, The New York Times focused on identifying people in positions of power. Publicly available information, like home addresses, quickly identified many figures.
“We followed military officials with security clearances as they drove home at night,” wrote Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel, reporters at The New York Times at the time the article was published. “We tracked law enforcement officers as they took their kids to school. We watched high-powered lawyers (and their guests) as they traveled from private jets to vacation properties.
“Watching dots move across a map sometimes reveals hints of faltering marriages, evidence of drug addiction, records of visits to psychological facilities.”
Deducing this level of information from data feels alarmingly like reading someone else’s diary. According to Paul Ohm, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, DNA is the only thing harder to anonymize than someone’s geolocation information.
In a statement to its customers regarding the potential sale of their DNA, the biotech company assured that “any buyer of 23andMe will be required to comply with applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data.”
What seems like sound assurance of our data’s protection quickly turns on its head when we realize that the U.S., like the rest of the world, is relatively laissez-faire in its data privacy laws. Only 20 states have comprehensive consumer privacy laws as of April 2025.
Even then, the rights the laws ensure only apply to these states’ residents, regardless of the company’s location.
The U.S. Constitution may not mention words like data privacy, location-tracking or cellphones. But, it does mention the Third Amendment, ensuring us protection in our homes; the Fourth Amendment, giving us the right against unreasonable searches; and the Fifth Amendment, protecting us against self-incrimination.
Yet, no federal law protects Americans from the lucrative business of data tracking.
As a result, our headlines are filled with stories of companies being negligent in their data practices, which can ultimately compromise a customer’s well-being. Take SafeGraph, for example, a geospatial data company founded in 2016.
In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, effectively ending federal protections for abortion access. Many states are now seeing near-total abortion bans, and those in need of an abortion in these states are likely to travel.
Smartphones and other devices continuously collect location information, which can reveal patterns in people’s whereabouts, such as visits to specific clinics or travel across state lines to areas where abortion remains legal.
VICE’s news outlet, Motherboard, reported that SafeGraph obtained this data and repackaged it into a product called “Patterns,” including location data for over 600 Planned Parenthood locations. Many of these facilities offered abortion access.
According to SafeGraph’s website, Patterns’ data aimed to answer questions such as how often people visited these clinics, how long they stayed and where they traveled from. It can even determine where a person lives based on a phone’s location overnight.
In states like Texas and Oklahoma, which have laws criminalizing and penalizing those who receive abortions, the implications of such privacy breaches are deeply alarming.
As companies continue to exploit our data with minimal accountability, we must push for laws that promote transparency and regulation.
Many have stepped up to the task, with more and more activists dedicating themselves to advocating for digital privacy every year. One such figure is Professor Emerita Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard Business School.
Over the past 15 years, Zuboff has spoken and written about the dangers of unregulated Big Tech. Her 2019 novel, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” launched global conversations on tech ethics. She has given U.S. Congressional testimonies and participated in various European policy forums, using her research to fight for data privacy protection.
“If the digital future is to be our home, then it is we who must make it so,” Zuboff wrote in a 2014 essay published in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a German newspaper.
In an era where our choices, movements and DNA are being tracked and sold, indifference and passiveness are no longer choices. The erosion of privacy is not some distant, abstract threat — it is happening now.
Gurneer is a freshman in LAS.
