Name: How Your Private Data Is Packaged, Sold, and Deployed to Target You | Joe Weil
Uploaded: 2025-12-03T14:55:04.000Z
Description: 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.”

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] 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 NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Joe Weil, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Thank you, Jan. It’s a pleasure to be here.

So let’s say I’m a high-end digital marketer, or a Chinese Communist Party [CCP] spy, or a government agent. What can I find out relatively quickly about me from my cell phone and from my digital presence?

Unfortunately, quite a lot, Jan. The way it works is that our phones and the apps on them are subsidized by advertising information that exists in databases that advertisers can purchase, but anyone can purchase it, and the main thing that is obtainable is your location all of the time. But not just your location; the other people you co-locate with—so who you’re at home with, who you’re at work with, who you go to the gym with, who you might have another hobby with—all of this information is easily discernible to create what are called patterns of life. And the details of our lives are really discoverable first from our location, but then also from what we look at on our phones, what sites we visit, what apps we have on our phones—things like this.

So advertisers are able to put together, think of it like a three-dimensional topographical map of the relationships of the people in the country, where they go, and also what they do on their phones in many cases. So it’s very easy to discern, for example, if the government or the CCP or anyone wanted to find out, hey, show me the folks in the country who go to this particular denomination—that is immediately discernible. Show me the people who go to gun shops—immediately discernible. Show me the people who go to crypto conventions—immediately discernible.

And that’s just groups; you can also use the same data to locate individuals and say, okay, I happen to know that a person works here and their kid goes to school here. You can buy cell phone data from an area, apply those two location filters, and follow that phone around in real time to determine where they sleep and who else sleeps in the house. It’s pretty shocking.

And basically, you’re saying you can kind of triangulate. The individual-level data is not available, right? Like how can you kind of triangulate on someone?

It is discernible. If you recall, Dinesh D’Souza made a really interesting documentary about the 2020 election and individual phones that were going from drop boxes to an NGO [non-governmental organization]. It’s the same technology. So the way it works is you buy, for an advertising campaign, the smartphone location data for a whole area, and then you can apply filters.

You can say, here’s all the phones from Washington, D.C. Show me the phones. I have millions of phones. Show me the phones that have gone to 101 Constitution Avenue and this Equinox gym that I happen to know Jan goes to. Okay, there’s 100 phones. Now, I’ve heard him mention that he really likes this one pub. Show me any of these 100 phones that admit to that pub. Oh, there’s only one.

Now I found the IMEI [International Mobile Equipment Identity] number of that phone, and I can use that IMEI against any other location of smartphone data. So I can say, all right, did that phone also go to Hong Kong? Great, where was it in Hong Kong?  So now I’ve got your pattern of life in D.C. and another place you may have gone. It’s incredible.

And then all sorts of things you might not want people to know about. Let’s say you went, I don’t know, maybe you had a top-secret meeting with someone, right?

Yes, this is a big issue. So all of our government agents, operators, and private people in private business are facing this problem. Where you go is easily discoverable from advertising data from smartphones. And this is just publicly available? It’s publicly available. It’s purchasable.

We have a friend named Mike Yeagley. He’s the primary subject of, Means of Control, Byron Tau’s great book that really lifted the curtain on this. Mike became famous because he purchased data and showed the head of the DOD [U.S. Dept. of Defense] the home addresses of an entire Delta team. So he purchased some advertising data, used some open-source information, and got the home addresses of some of our most secret people.

So, yes, this is purchasable. And what is, I think, very important is not only is it purchasable, it is not protected with Fourth Amendment protections. So the government does not require warrants to access this. So this is important. If the government wants to track your location from the cell phone carrier and say, hey, AT&T, show me where Jan is all the time, they need a warrant to get AT&T to give that over. Unless, of course, it’s 2021 and AT&T wants to give the information over to the Justice Department. But normally it would require a warrant.

This information, this advertising information, falls under a legal distinction called the third-party doctrine. This was established in the Warren Court in the 1970s. And it basically says that when a customer hands over data willingly to a third party, it loses Fourth Amendment protections. This was originally applied to banking data and phone company data, some metadata that was in those accounts. But now it’s applied to all the app data, all the advertising data coming from our apps.

So this whole pipeline I just described to you, which allows us to be discoverable as individuals and also to be profiled in groups—who’s Christian? Who’s Muslim? All of this is not Fourth Amendment protected. So yes, anyone can do it. Criminals can do it. Private investigators can do it. Advertisers can do it. The CCP can do it. Our own government can do it.

The astonishing thing here is, here at Epoch Times, having been under attack from the Chinese Communist Party for the last 25 years, basically since we were founded, I’m actually a lot less concerned about the U.S. government looking in, as much as that’s a very reasonable thing to be very concerned about, than to have people who are seeking to have this company destroyed because it reveals uncomfortable truths—the information they have about us.

I mentioned Mike and the process of showing the DOD the location of these special operators. I think his point was, if I can do this, obviously China is doing this. So I think your concern about the CCP having access to this data is extremely well-founded. And it should really tell us something that China’s Internet is closed and ours operates like this. There is a, you know, we cannot do this in China. They can do this here. And it’s a huge vulnerability.

So yes, I tend to focus on the civil liberties aspect of this as we sit beneath this painting of the founders. But I agree with you that perhaps the greater actual existential risk may be a foreign adversary who can easily find the people they want to put pressure on, who can easily find the people that they’re going to want to take off the board in a crisis. That’s all mapped out from our phones.

I’m excited to talk to you about how your company, Unplugged, is trying to kind of challenge this whole reality. Before we go there, I mean, you have a fascinating background, right? And just tell me about kind of how you came to your current work.

I had been in the advertising business. I had a really exciting company in the advertising production business in New York. My family had been in that business. In 2013, a friend and mentor of mine had suggested, hey, why don’t we start a video app? This was at the time when apps were starting to do a lot on our phones. If you recall, the big shift in mobile was with LTE [long-term evolution] getting pretty fast data to your phone. That’s when Instagram and Snapchat and Pinterest, and all this happened in a very quick period.

So in this gold rush of apps, I was one of those people who built an app or put together a team and built an app, and Apple acquired that application, and it became part of the iPhone. It became a video editing product on the iPhone, and I entered Apple in 2015 and built a team there doing zero-to-one projects, new efforts in the services domain that leveraged the hardware capabilities of the phone.

So this ranged from many things, from on-device intelligence—if you have an iPhone and it suggests who you might share a photo with, we helped design that—to even well-being products on iPhone, like the journal application. But we really focused on how to use the hardware to create new, special, sticky customer experiences. It was a wonderful place to do that.

I always really looked up to Apple’s communications in the 90s, when Steve came back and refounded the company, they really spoke to me, this freedom-oriented, individualistic, creative, pioneering vibe—the “Think Different” direction—really spoke to me. I had hair to my waist. I was driving a ’69 VW bus out of high school. And I really identified with this freedom and creative energy of Apple, with their ad, don’t let 1984 be like 1984. Steve was an incredible innovator. By the way, we should also remember when we talk about Apple under Steve, we’re really talking about dozens of excellent, exceptionally creative people who were teams that he worked with.

My first meeting at Apple was in the design studio with Jony Ive showing him my app. It was a very surreal moment for me, and it was a huge honor to be able to participate in this company that I grew up not admiring, but really, it was like an iconic American brand for me. As I entered Apple and had this uphill climb, I’d never been in a big company. I’d always been an entrepreneur, sort of building things from scratch. You know, I had a lot to learn. I had to adjust to being in a big company. That was a bumpy road, and people were patient with me, and I was very grateful for that.

I did, however, see things change as I settled in at Apple. At first, it was a totally non-political or apolitical environment. No one talked about politics at work. I really liked that because the Bay Area is very Left-wing radical. I wasn’t in that spot. So I was happy that it wasn’t like stories I’d heard about Google and Meta, or Facebook at the time, which were very politicized. Apple was a lot more just, we show up, do our jobs.

That changed in 2016 when the president was elected to his first term. And the change began with small comments, you know, criticizing Trump, you know, criticizing Trump supporters. And it quickly picked up steam. I recall in 2018 into 2019, as the Me Too movement started kicking up, really high-energy discussions about who should and shouldn’t be allowed on the internet were happening at work. And in COVID, this really hit a fever pitch.

And I think two things sort of happened in symbiosis. Number one,the origin of COVID became something you could not talk about at work. And,  as I understood it, it was really sort of policed on the platform. And then, of course, when George Floyd died, that kicked off this giant sort of Maoist racial reckoning inside the company. So this place where I’d started out that was apolitical, now suddenly I was getting called into like mandatory struggle sessions, which was really surreal. During COVID, in my kitchen on a laptop, I’m even listening to a produced video series with Maoist messaging about the purpose of the United States being the imprisonment and harm of black people. Crazy stuff. This hit its peak then.

And what happened, as we recall, there was a sort of frenzy moment where it was very much like a Salem witch trial. I’m sure we all can recall that vibe in the culture. Things settled down, but with a new baseline. So it did not return to the Apple that I recall. It returned to a new set of norms, which was explicitly described as the intent. We’re going to have new norms, primarily around hiring. Every hiring process required thorough effort to bring anyone other than white men into the process explicitly.

So it was decided and explained to all hiring managers that we’re going to change the composition of the company. It’s too white. This is unfair. It’s unjust. We need to make the country better. We need to make a better world. So we’re going to basically stop hiring white men. Without saying that exactly, that was obviously the message and the requirement.

So a new sort of status quo settled in, in which the hiring process, when I was hiring teams, became ultra-politicized. It was very clear if I had a white male in the pool, that was a problem. If I had non-white males in the pool, that was great. So that message was very clear. Also, while all of this was happening, the transgender language police became part of the daily experience.

So that meant for me, for everyone, I think it was quarterly, like online, like re-education sessions to make sure we were understanding how to use the right pronouns with the right people, depending on their requirements. And new hires, in order to get a badge, would have to give a set of pronouns.  So I remember looking in the directory and seeing my name and I didn’t have the pronouns, and I’d see other people who’d been there a while still didn’t have the pronouns. But everyone knew who would come into the company would have to sort of submit to this.

So the big change for me, obviously, with COVID and the censorship, the censorship of Parler, I recall in January 2021, when after a year-and-a-half of basically all conservatives being removed from all social media, there was one app left, which was Parler, that allowed conservative traditional voices to express themselves. Just as Alex Jones had been depersoned by Apple in 2018 from the podcast platform, the existence of Parler was seen as unacceptable because it was out of line with the narrative. Then Parler was removed from the Apple App Store. And then Google pulled it within an hour. And then Amazon pulled its web services.

Here I was looking around. And that was the first moment where I was like, I might really not be able to make a difference here. And this really might be a force against the health of civilization.This might be an anti-civilization force that I’m supporting. And, you know, over the subsequent years, that was really the moment where I started really, really seeing this.

And over the following couple of years, I really, you know, I was an advocate in the company for my beliefs. I was very open about my perspective about things. I wasn’t silenced, but it was certainly uncomfortable. And I just, I guess I really realized, like, do I want to build a company that my sons couldn’t work at?

Because that’s what I was doing. I was helping grow an organization that explicitly was showing me it wouldn’t hire my sons, who are white men. And that, for me, was when I saw at that time, I saw my now partner, Erik Prince, on a podcast talking about a new smartphone platform based on values we shared. That’s when I said, it might be time to do this.

You were looking to have genuine viewpoint diversity, or you were looking at what is that value that you’re talking about?

There are several layers. The first thing is I think that smartphone companies should not be political organizations, which is what Apple had become. So that was my first major concern: wow, we’re all experiencing the world through Apple and Google. They’re ostensibly different companies, but they’re very symbiotic. Financially, they’re very tied. And ideologically, they’re very, very tied. They’re both promoting the same message in the world and silencing the same messages in the world.

So my sense was, wow, we’re at risk as a republic to be experiencing the world, getting our news, sharing our information through two platforms. We have a duopoly that will control what we can say,what we can see. So that was my big concern: okay, our country is designed to enable viewpoint diversity and the sharing of information freely. And technically, we still live in that country.

However, we’re living in that country through smartphones that don’t provide those same freedoms. So it was as if Apple and Google had sort of become a shadow government that we were sort of living under. And that was for me a big concern. So yes, when I saw a new platform starting, that’s why, man, we need something new where the breadth of freedom and viewpoint diversity and different ideas can thrive. So for me, censorship was a key one.

The other is this data privacy issue, that not only was I concerned about the First Amendment and our ability to express ourselves openly and freely, but this Fourth Amendment issue, this notion that my device that I’m carrying with me everywhere is spewing all of this information. And the truth is, I didn’t really start looking into this until I learned about Unplugged. And I asked them to actually do some cyber tests to demonstrate to me how leaky the iPhone was. I had no idea. I had absolutely no idea about this.

And when I saw these numbers, it really blew my hair back. And I was like, wow, this is much worse than I thought. My device, I’m thinking that I push like “ask app not to track,” and that means something when in fact, my phone is spewing tons of information to these data harvesters, and not just me, my wife, and potentially my kids. This was the second layer.

First was, can we have freedom if we’re on platforms that don’t enable freedom? The second was, can we have freedom if we’re living on devices that are surrendering our information to foreign adversaries, our own government? And then lastly, there was the big gap for me and the big opportunity, I think, is what am I funding as a customer of this?

Concerning the wealth transfer of American consumers through iPhones, I don’t think we realize how much money this operation is. The wealth transfer by giving money to Apple to make the phones in China, where Apple has invested an estimated trillion dollars since 2008, much more than that. You know, we imagine a huge program like the Marshall Plan when we rebuilt Europe after World War II. It’s much larger than that, inflation-adjusted. It’s estimated they’ve trained 28 million Chinese workers.

So when I think about this and the growth of China from our money through Apple to support China, and also how our money through Apple is being used to finance and support, I think, really concerning organizations, for example, ones that proclaim and lobby for transgender visibility or decarceration efforts in big cities. These seem to me to be really dangerous causes that smartphone companies should not be in the business of.

So this was a big change. Under Steve Jobs, Apple was not politically active. It was not pushing tons of money all over the place. And it has changed. And it’s become a really enormous political activist company, alongside Meta and others.

You know, one thing that just really strikes me here is that this is an investment into a totalitarian regime, which seeks to destabilize America. And the programs you’re discussing, like this is, there was this whole mantra, in a way we were founded at Epoch Times to challenge this mantra that, you know, if we pump enough money as the West into communist China, they’re going to change, they’re going to become a democracy and all this kind of stuff. We didn’t realize that it was totalitarian, that they have no interest in fostering civil society, that they’re just going to use the money and then change us. And when I look at these programs that you’re describing, some of these, those are very much in line with what the Chinese Communist Party wants because they’re destabilizing things.

Yes. This really came to light during COVID and this 2020, 2021 period when the kind of mask came off. And yes, I’m certain Apple does support many other organizations also. But this idea, the core idea of the CCP through these organizations like Liberation Road that Trevor Loudon and others talk about was very much on a loudspeaker inside of Apple. You know, I mean, even it got as explicit as saying that COVID came from China was racist.

That was a real expectation and theme inside the company, meaning like, let’s all have a meeting and the special team in the company is going to tell us about how saying that COVID came from China is racist and similar to the, there was this attempt to sort of connect the death of George Floyd and all the emotions around that and the perceptions around that with saying COVID was from China. I remember this very, very clearly.

So yes, to me, there was enormous overlap between the messaging of the CCP and the internal messaging within Apple and also the standards and soft censorship of the platform. The perspective was very clearly out of alignment with a pro-America perspective. America’s great because it’s a free country that allows us to say that America’s terrible. That was the extent of America’s greatness.

In the last 15, 20 years, we’ve had this massive change to our economy. Smartphones have changed everything. Enormous wealth has been created. I don’t think we realize the velocity of change we’ve just lived through. The way we connect with each other, the way we relive our memories, the way we buy food, the way we get taxis, the way we rent homes, all of it has changed. The way we get information and facts, all of this has changed in a very short amount of time.

And it has changed not only our day-to-day lives, but it’s changed our economy and it’s changed our country. And it’s also changed China’s. And I think we need to look at what’s happened in both countries and understand and really ask ourselves, is this the direction we want to continue going in? Because we really are, I believe, at a crossroads as AI comes online and becomes a much more everyday part of our lives.

Well, and here’s the thing, right? You were discussing how you can triangulate on a person, get unbelievable amounts of highly personal data on an individual person based on public-sourced information that’s available for not a lot of money, quite frankly. With AI now, anyone can probably do that. Just say, hey, buy this, get me this data. Or you don’t even have to ask that. You could just say, here’s what I want, and it’ll give you a price, and then you’ll get the answer. Or can that happen?

The way I would say it is you can now take the data you can download from an online marketer and use an LLM [large language model] to give you a very high-resolution analysis of it. So the way to think about it is LLMs have democratized data analysis. So the data’s there. Problem number one is that the data is there.

Our country is designed so that data like this is not out there. The whole premise of the Fourth Amendment, even in Article I, you know, Article I, right after Congress establishes money, they establish the post office. And it sounds so mundane to us. The post office is like this boring part of our culture now. But it was a revolutionary idea that there would be a public utility that enabled private communication. And one of the big arguments the founders made in their debates about the need for the post office was the way people outside of cities got newspapers.

So the post office was the internet of the time, and it was designed to be private. The Postal Service Act of 1792 made it a felony, and it’s still a felony, hundreds of years later, to open someone else’s mail. They made it a felony for a postal worker to describe or sell information about your parcels. That’s still a felony. So our country’s designed and coded with these protections in the Bill of Rights with institutions like the Post Office designed to protect our information, our private letters.

Now, we’re living in this new world that the Constitution didn’t really envision with none of these standards, expectations, or protections. And the downside here is when we have an adversary like the CCP, who, you know, we’re familiar with unrestricted warfare, the idea that we’re basically in this gray zone war in which everything is a battlefield from viruses to stock market fluctuations to news manipulation. This is a massive vulnerability that we’re living in right now.

So this is something I find very interesting because at my job, whether it was at Apple or now at Unplugged, people would frequently ask me, what’s the back door? Is there something, you know, people imagine like Sandra Bullock movies in the 90s with some hacker up all night with Mountain Dew, finding some way into my Facebook page.

I often tell people, you don’t need to worry about the back door. The front door is open. All of it is out there in a very dangerous environment. So just as we don’t understand the risk of our data being out there, of our phones spilling out all this information. Many of us also don’t realize we’re in a live conflict with the CCP now. That’s happening. We are experiencing it.

One; we’re very vulnerable as individuals and as a country to leave the front door of our data open like this. Two; to surrender ourselves and our communications to platforms that have demonstrated recently they will censor things that are inconvenient and out of line with the party line of one party in the US or incidentally out of line with the desire of what the CCP would like to have said here.

So I think we really need to pause and reflect because AI is only going to accelerate these risks. It’s not going to reduce these risks. AI is going to further enhance and move us into a world where more and more of our lives are on our phones. Like, if you zoom the lens out and just think about this transition, right? This really started in the LTE iPhone 5 and 6 era, when the app economy really exploded, right? And if we think about what happened in really 15 years, 2010, it might even be 2012, but let’s just call it 15 years, how much the country’s changed, how much our lives have changed.

One way to see this shift is in 2010, TV was the main way to advertise. And the average American was seeing roughly, let’s call it, three hours of screen time a day. It’s estimated 2,000 ads in total between posters, TV ads, and newspaper ads.

A day?

Yes, and that was back then. Here we are now with a median of seven, eight, nine hours of screen time.  And with younger ages, it’s even more. So the amount of screen time has multiplied. The number of ads has ballooned to well over 10,000. So this shift is very significant. More than half of our waking hours are transacting, viewing, consuming, expressing, connecting, discovering on platforms that are extremely vulnerable.

So again, this is the question of where’s the back door? What’s the secret exploit? I’m sure that there are interesting discussions to have there. But I think we’re missing the forest for the trees, or as Ben Franklin said, we might be being penny wise and pound foolish, right? Advertisers primarily were living on platforms the proliferation of which has been subsidized by advertising that’s been the main incentive.

When you compare 2010 to today, TV advertising in 2010 was roughly 70 billion at its peak. Here we are today smartphone advertising is nearing 400 billion and that’s not even including the data harvesting industry. That’s behind the smartphone advertising industry complex. So we’ve had a massive ballooning of the overall economic value and velocity of advertising. That’s been the primary incentive.

While we have these adversaries in the CCP who I think have probably a more shrewd and long-term view of these issues, we’ve just sort of been chasing the next most convenient, profitable thing, which is really what I think is at the heart of Apple and China. The story of that book is incredible. I don’t think for one second anyone at Apple, I would never guess anyone at Apple would think, how can we help China and harm the U.S.? I don’t think that for a second. I do think the short-term incentives from Wall Street, from stock price growth led to these outcomes.

So again, AI will bring more onto our phones, as AI will bring more of our daily lives into the digital sphere, as AI will increase the risks of criminals and other adversaries being able to manipulate our data. and target us, this is the moment for us to pause and say, all right, we’re at a crossroads. This is what’s happened over the last 15 years. A lot of good things have happened. A lot of bad things have happened. How do we pick and choose what we want to take and what we want to leave behind?

Because this notion that we’re stuck on these two platforms or that this duopoly is our only option is a total fallacy. This duopoly occurred very quickly through our own purchasing power. So we are the people playing the tune here. And these tech companies are dancing to our tune as consumers.

So for me, this is the moment for us as Americans, as consumers, and as innovators to think, what is the future going to look like? Is it going to be going further down this path where we find ourselves with another COVID-like crisis that warrants all manner of insane civil liberties abuses, medical freedom limitations, censorship, canceling of people for opinions and association?

Is it more of that? Or are we going to return to our roots? Are we going to return to the design of the Constitution and the Republic? Because our founders, I mean, we’re very blessed. Our founders luckily did the homework for us. We’re not so studious these days. You know, they did the homework for us, whether it was understanding the biblical principles of the corruption of every human heart, which is really a big message that our founders understood: we’re all corrupt. We shouldn’t have that much power.

Or the history research they did for us. They understood what happened in Rome, in Athens, in the various city-states when democracy could be turned against itself. They did this research for us, and they designed a system that really is awesome at protecting us by preventing any organization or person from having this power over others. And we’re surrendering that right now.

But we don’t have to. And it’s not like we have to have some big decoupling. We can just make better choices. We can make better choices and have all the conveniences of technology. I’m not proposing at all that we go back to a pre-smartphone era. Smartphones are great. It’s awesome.

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