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

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

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.

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? Just that signal, which is available to every app all the time, tells a data harvester, is yon moving, is yon laying down, is yon in a car, is yon exercising? 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. Today I sit down with Joe Weil, CEO of Unplugged. We explore how smartphones quietly track our every move and how that data can be purchased and used to build detailed profiles of individual people. And this is just publicly available? It's publicly available. It's purchasable. 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. While calls out Apple and Google as key players in this data economy, explains how unplugged aims to give users real control with a privacy-first smartphone. phone. This is a national security issue. It's an economic issue. It's a cultural issue. It's a civil liberties issue.

A revealing look at what your phone really knows. This is American Thought Leaders. And I'm Yanya Kelley. 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 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 our phones and the apps on them are subsidized by advertising information, which 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 what we look at on our phones, what sites we visit, what apps we have on our phone, 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. locate individuals and say, oh, 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, who else sleeps in the house. It's pretty shocking. 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 election, the 2020 election, and individual phones that were going from Dropboxes to NGOs.

It's the same technology. So the way it works is you buy, for an advertising campaign, you buy the smartphone location data for a whole area, and then you can apply filters. You can say, okay, here's all the phones from Washington, D.C. show me the phones so 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

Yon goes to okay there's a hundred phones interesting now I've heard him mention that he really likes this one pub show me any of these hundred phones that admit to that pub oh there's only one now I found the IMEI or the identifier of that phone and I can use

that IMEI against any other location data 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, you know, all sorts of things you might not want to know people to know about. Let's say you went, I mean, 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, 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 Yagley. He's the primary subject of means of control. Byron Tau's great book that really lifted the curtain on this. And Mike sort of became famous because he purchased data and showed the head of the DOD. Here's the home addresses of an entire Delta team. So he purchased some advertising data, use some open source information, and got the home addresses of some of our most secret people. So yeah, this is purchasable. And what's 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 Yan 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 third-party doctrine. This was established in the Warren Court in the 70s, 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, who's, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 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, we've, you know, having been at 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, right? The information they have about us. And now I mentioned Mike in the process of showing the DOD, the location of these special operators. I think his point was, if I can do this, obviously China's 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 into 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. our phones. If you recall, the big shift in mobile was with LTE, getting pretty fast data to your phone.

That's when Instagram and Snapchat and Pinterest and, you know, 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, became a video editing product on the iPhone. And I entered Apple in 20,000. And I entered Apple in 2015 and built a team there doing like zero to one projects. New efforts in the services domain that leveraged hardware capabilities of the phone. So this range from many things, from on-device intelligence. If you have an iPhone and it suggests who you might share a photo with, we help design that, to even well-being products on iPhone like the journal application. But we really

focus on how to use the hardware to create new special sticky customer experience. It was a wonderful place to do that. I mean, in many ways, it's a company that I always really looked up to. Apple's communications in the 90s, when Steve came back and sort of re-founded the company, really spoke to me. You know, this freedom-oriented, individualistic, creative, pioneering vibe. The think different direction really spoke to me. You know, I had hair to my waist.

I was driving at 69 VW bus out of high school. school and I really identified with this freedom and creative energy of Apple. The hammer breaking. Yeah, the 1884. Don't let 1984 be like 1984. And I really, you know, Steve was an incredible innovator. And 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. To become part of Apple, you know, my first meeting at Apple was in the design studio with Johnny 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 this a lot to learn. I had to adjust to be in a big company. That was 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 like that because the Bay Area is, you know, very kind of 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 like who should and shouldn't be allowed on the internet were happening at work and in COVID this really hit a fever 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 was 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, I'm like in my kitchen on a laptop and I'm hearing like, you know, weather underground speeches from, you know, leaders of the company. It was, it was really wild. even video series, produced video series with, I really mean like Maoist messaging about the purpose of the United States being the imprisonment and harm of black people, et cetera, et cetera.

You know, crazy stuff. So this sort of hit its peak then. And what happened, you know, 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, you know, we're going to change the composition of the company. It's too white. You know, 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, the hiring process 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, you know, 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, you know, and I'd see other people who'd been there a while still didn't have the pronouns, you know, but everyone knew who would come into the company would have to sort of submit to this. So, um, The big change for me, obviously, you know, with COVID and the censorship, the censorship of Parlor, I recall in January 2021, when after, you know, a year and a half of basically all conservatives being removed from all social media, there was one app left, which was Parlor, that allowed conservative traditional voices to express themselves. And just as Alex Jones had been sort of depersoned by Apple in 2018 from the podcast platform. the existence of Parlor was seen as unacceptable because it was out of line with the, you know, the narrative. And Parlor was removed from the Apple App Store, and then Google pulled it within an hour, and then Amazon pulled its web services.

And 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 that was really the moment where I started really really seeing this and over the following couple 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 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 Eric Prince on a podcast talking about a new smartphone platform based on values we shared. That's when I said, you know, I think it might be time to do this. You were looking to have genuine viewpoint diversity, or you were looking at, what is that value, right, that you're talking about? Thank you, so I think there are several layers. 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 was, 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 tired. And ideologically, they're very tired.

they're very, very tight. They're both promoting the same message in the world and silencing the same messages in the world. So my sense was, wow, like 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 was, 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 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 what, 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, is that not only was I concerned about 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 test 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, et cetera. So I think 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? 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, it's estimated a 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 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 is the 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 investment into a totalitarian regime, which seeks to destabilize America, and the programs you were discussing, like this is, you know, we, there was this whole mantra in a way we were founded at Epak 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 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. And I think we got a glimpse of this. This really came to light during COVID and this 2020, 2021 period when the kind of mass came off. And yes, you know, I'm certain Apple does support many other organizations also. But the this idea, the core idea of the CCP, you know, through these organizations like Liberation Road that Trevor Loud and others talk about

was very much on a loudspeaker inside of Apple. You know, I mean, 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 a 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 is terrible. That was like the extent of America's great. So, yeah, I think it really, Apple for me, is a wonderful way to, it's an important way for us to ask. 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 much more everyday part of our lives. Well, and here's the thing, right?

You were discussing how you can triangulate on a person to 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. You know, with AI now, you can, you know, kind of anyone can probably do that. Just say, hey, buy this, get me this data. 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. The way I would say it is like you can now take the data you can download from an online marketer and use an LLM to give you very high resolution analysis of it. So the way to think about it is LLMs have democratized data analysis. So the data is there. Problem number one is 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 1, you know, Article 1, right after Congress establishes money, they establish the post office.

And it sounds so mundane to us. The post office is like this boring kind of snoopy part of our culture now. But it was a revolutionary idea that there would be a public utility that enabled private communication. One of the big arguments the founders made in their debates about the need for the post office was it 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 Post Office 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 work.

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. And 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 my job, whether it was at Apple or now it unplugged, people will frequently ask me like, you know, what's the back door? Like, is there something? People imagine like Sandra Bullock movies in the 90s with some hacker up all night with Mountain Dew, you know, finding some way into my Facebook page or whatever.

And it's like, I often tell people like, you don't need to worry about the back door. Like the front door is open. All of it's 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 of 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. And we're very vulnerable as individuals and as a country to leave the front door of our data open like this. One, two, to surrender ourselves and our communications to two 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 U.S. 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 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 5-6 era when like the app economy really exploded right and if we think about what's happened in

really 15 years 2010 I mean, 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 and TV ads and newspaper ads. A day?

Yeah, that was then. Here we are now with a median of 7, 8, 9. hours of screen time you go younger ages and it's even more so the amount of screen time has multiplied the number of ads has ballooned to a well over 10,000 so this shift is is very significant we are more than half of our waking hours are are transacting viewing consuming expressing connecting discovering on platforms that are extremely vulnerable so again this this this question of you know where's where's the back door what's the what's the secret exploit you know

sure we can yeah 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 the platforms we're living on are designed to benefit advertisers primarily we're living on platforms the proliferation of which has been subsidized by a advertising that's been the main the main incentive so when you compare again 2010 to today TV advertising in 2010 was roughly 70 billion at its peak this is its peak okay here we are today smartphone advertising is nearing what 400 billion and that's not even including the data harvesting industry that's

behind the smartphone industry complex advertising industry complex right so we've had a massive ballooning of the overall economic value and velocity of advertising. That's been the primary incentive. Well, 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, et cetera, led to these outcomes. So again, as AI will bring us 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, like, all right, we're at a crossroads. This is what's happened over the last 15 years. A lot of good things that happened, a lot of bad things that 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 like, 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. Like, our founders luckily did the homework for us. Like, 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 was 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. Like, we can just make better choices. We can make make better choices, 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. No, but it sounds like you're suggesting that, you know, data should be treated the same way the post office was treated, right? Or something in that vein, right?

My view here is, my view is twofold. Yes, our data should be treated the way the post office was treated, treated parcels. But I would say as important, we should not assume that any government or leader is going to do that for us. We as Americans are going to have to insist on better products. Come on, my goodness, here we are in Washington. Like, are we under the impression that given all the financial interests at stake

and all the incentives I just described that Congress is going to somehow protect us from it? No, I mean, you know, there's too much money to be made here. I think the opportunity for us is to return ourselves to the structure, nature protections of our republic to insist as customers on better products but what's really interesting here is your argument is that the national security interest which is sometimes like for example the patriot act has been used to erode civil liberties you're raising i think a fantastic symbiosis between the civil liberties protection and the national security threat these are extremely connected uh yes so just as

our civil liberties can be eroded by our data being out there to be manipulated, targeted, organized, to compartmentalize us, it's a tool for our adversaries to target us. And the status quo is just it's unsafe. It's unsafe from a what's going to happen. Let's say, here are a few scenarios we can easily imagine. A conflict with China over Taiwan or something, right? There's some conflict with China. And we know China's already in all many of our infrastructure, water treatment, electrical grid, et cetera. You know, there's a lot of cyber activity there. The gloves were just dropped with these, you know, very detailed,

minute restrictions on rare earths and critical minerals. That was, I mean, most people would say a shot across the bow in this unrestricted warfare doctrine. Yeah, the 100th shot across the bow or the 1,000th. Well, but this one's sort of acute in a way that you had, you know, a Dutch, company basically nationalize its chip maker, a chip maker, right? Because it's so serious. It's time to wake up. The conflict here is intensifying and we're as vulnerable as ever. And not only are we as vulnerable as ever, we are paying a company to transfer our wealth to the adversary that is posing the threat. We are paying for this. This is not happening

outside of us. This is happening when we give money for our ICloud subscription or go to buy a new phone or need the latest headset or whatever. We're paying for it. We're paying for this. So I think this is, yeah, my clarion call here is it's time to get back to the basics as Americans, the values of our Constitution, but also protecting our national interests in creating value here. So this is another big thing we're focused on with our work is not just designing systems and products that protect data but bringing manufacturing back here right so we're standing up an assembly line right now to build our product here which is this is not easy i mean we have for a genera more than a generation we have funded the atrophying of this capability there are not many

people in the united states who know how to make a smartphone here it's it's basically a non-existent specialty here so building this muscle we're having to really start from from the basics starting with assembly and then you know various component manufacturing but this is going to take work in ingenuity but it's doable and we're americans this is what we do we innovate we work it's time to roll up our sleeves so i think in many ways the the metaphor of surrendering the manufacturing to china oh yeah take care of it for us at a nice margin and we see what's happened their their cities have gone up and our cities have turned into slums in the same way we've surrendered the rights to our as these massive companies of software designers have grown up and mom and pop businesses have withered right we've seen the price of these trades and it's time for us to really ask what is our role in doing this and this is I think is a very important part of the whole American experience is what made this country right not people pointing their fingers right our founders and not just our founders through through the generations the people who've built maintain

strength in this country are the people who got in the arena not that people who sat back and just pointed and criticized it through tomatoes so I think this is another thing for us to really ask ourselves is in a time where we see many of us we see that the country is not what we grew up in you know I mean my goodness I experiencing the American health care system today or the airline industry like I I remember very recently that planes used to take off when they were supposed to take off usually and they weren't suddenly canceling flights and i go to the airport now and there's no one working at rows and rows of stations in the airport many restaurants don't have

servers and like our quality of life is degrading before our eyes obviously we see this you know you step out of a few metropolitan areas and important areas of the company are of the country are atrophying this is a choice we're making this is a choice we're making for convenience and we can reverse this. So yeah, I think that this is a national security issue. It's an economic issue. It's a cultural issue. It's a civil liberties issue.

And it's time for us to kind of get in the ring as innovators, as primarily as customers. This to me is the big battleground. I'm obviously concerned about this data harvesting. How is it that my life can be better or safer, right? working with, for example, an unplugged product? So our goal, there's other products in this space. So the main message I want to send to people is

explore alternatives. And we have, I believe, the best one of them, but find the right one for you. But find alternatives, and there are many. This notion that we have to sacrifice freedom and safety for convenience is an illusion. And a lot of technology trends are making possible today, what was not possible even a few years ago,

for new platforms to exist, and we're one of them. So what do we offer? We offer a smartphone, meaning it's a phone and it's a software ecosystem that is designed on a few really key differentiating elements. Number one, we make no money at all, directly or indirectly from customer data, and we give customers tools to make it harder

for third parties to get their data. And there's layers of this. So the way I would describe the smartphone data, safety, sphere. It's like a diamond with different facets, and we're trying to bring, and we're bringing protection to each one. So the first key here is, when you're talking about this space, there's a tendency to think, like, how do I get off the grid? How do I totally remove myself? Turn the signal to zero. And I would encourage us to take a less black and white attitude towards this. Obviously, we want to get the number, we want to get the signal as close

zero as possible. But I think that there's a tendency to look for fantastical scenarios that are not realistic. Our goal here is to get better and better and better and better and reduce the digital footprint in many, many ways. So what is one of the most important ways that our digital footprint grows out is with this third-party data harvesting. This is the big open front door. There are other ways, too. There's first-party data harvesting, which has other risks, but the greatest risk is this third-party data harvesting because this information is so easily obtainable and just and spell this out for me this is apps that I have on my phone passing data sure so let's say have you ever used an application like

Zillow to look at a house or an apartment have you ever sure okay so let's say I'm using an app like this to look at real estate okay okay first of all the app is on my phone it's presence on my phone in most cases there are some exceptions but many many many apps that we use all the time are reaching out to data harvesters even when I'm not using them to say here I am here I am here I am why because that location information if I know where you are every second and also think about you know that 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 just that signal which is available to every app all the time tells a data harvester is yon moving is yon land down is yawn in a car is yon exercising just think about that little piece of information it trip in connection with where you are and what other phones are around you that's a very important signal that adds a lot of texture and dimension to your profile so 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 then when you're in the app of course it's also essentially

selling the location it's attempting to get location, even if you've said don't give location. It has techniques called fingerprinting, these SDKs or software development kits on these apps, have techniques to fingerprint your device and find your location through Bluetooth or through the IP address of the modems and blah, blah, blah, blah. They're able to find where you are. And then, of course, there's what you're doing in the application. What houses are you looking at in this app? What price range are they? All of this. So all of this information is populating third party advertising data sets. This is the largest risk because it's the most

easily obtainable. It's also true that meta, Google, many other companies have first party data sets. I'm not minimizing the risks of these, but they're not as obviously easily obtainable as the open front door of your location, which is in these. Because at least they're saying we don't give this to people, right? Sure. And I'm not in favor of this, but you know, I, I The really, really big risk is what criminals, our government, or the CCP, can go online today and buy. And that's the low-hanging fruit of basically where you are and what websites you've been looking at. That's easily available. So how do we help with that?

We have a firewall on the phone. Normally firewalls historically have been handled on the server side, meaning they're like a server is routing traffic and saying, oh, don't go to this server because it's a known data harvester. We redesigned this concept because we think it's much better to have this product, this solution on the device rather than outsourced to a server. So we redesigned the flow of it so it's optimized to be able to run on a phone. And it also gives you a lot more resolution into what apps are making, what calls. So the firewall is one example of how the phone is stopping traffic to allow this third-party data harvesting to occur. That does not mean by any stretch that the phone stops all digital signals.

to all apps, nothing like that. Of course not. What it is doing, though, is turning the dial down a lot on the information spewing out of the phone. So I'll just give you an example. We had a cyber company compare our phone versus an iPhone and a Samsung and also a pixel. And I'll just use the iPhone for an example. One hour, 33 apps on the phone, all the apps we use, Spotify, Pinterest, whatever, you know, Expedia, things like this. And the cyber tester, just open the app, did a little scroll, go to a page, next app, one hour. On the iPhone, the cyber tester selected Ask app not to track on every app. Yet, in that one hour period, those 33 apps made 3,181 connections to known data harvesting servers.

And exchanged in that one hour, 211,000 packets of data, which is about 60 packets of data a second. And our phone stopped all of those. So this is an example. Does that mean that the phone is untraceable and you go completely dark? No, it means that it is a significant reduction in noise coming off the phone to these third-party data sets. There's other layers of it, though, that we think are also important. This is why we design the hardware, software, and services around this privacy issue. So I just described the firewall. There's another unique feature of our phone.

It sounds very simple. But in addition to a on-off software button where I can turn the phone off, it has a hardware switch, which separates the battery. from the electronics. It's like putting the phone in a Faraday bag, except better. Like, it's really off. The phone is dead when you turn this switch.

This may sound simple, but it's pretty important. A lot of times we turn our phone off and don't realize it can still be emitting signal. It can still be waking up and phoning home. Oh, here I am. Let me get that update, et cetera. So this hardware switch prevents that. Other important tools like data deletion and hardening tools. So, like, I have a feature set on my phone where it's really.

Routinely wiping the memory of the phone, which makes it basically impenetrable to sell bright and other software that agencies or criminals can use to literally unlock the phone by putting a wire in it and running some software and opening the phone, in which case all of your data would be available. So whether it's blocking traffic, protecting the actual data on the device if someone gets their hands on it, or being able to turn the phone physically off, you know, these are all surfaces where we're offering a lot more protection. where rather than whereas the other phones are designed to maximize profit for the company that makes them, ours is designed to protect the information of the customer. We don't make any money off of residual usage. Other things, you know, important distinctions. We have like a photo and video storage product. Unlike ICloud, which in which, you know, it's encrypted, but Apple can access the keys,

which, of course, in the UK, we learned recently the UK government has demanded the unencrypted data of Apple users. Our customers have an encrypted storage product that we don't have the keys to. So we treat it like crypto. When you sign up for the service, when you set your phone up and you move your photos over, you'll get keys. Don't lose the keys because we don't have them. And there's nothing for us to give the government if they come to us with a warrant, for example. So I would describe, you know, the entire platform is designed to allow the normal use of a phone. It runs basically any Android app.

My phone is set up like an iPhone. You can sort of decide when you set it up to have it in iPhone style or Android style. Mine is set up like an iPhone. It's a very easy to use phone. All my apps run. I can sign into all my accounts. We have like a password manager, all my passwords move over. And I have the benefits of a phone, but I'm releasing way less digital signal.

So as an example of, I mentioned that cyber test, just a real world example, is many special operators use our phone in combat area. And one of the things we've had to address for them is our device is much quieter than normal phones, meaning it's sending and receiving a lot less signal because of this third-party tracking issue. So for these customers, we've had to offer essentially like a fake signal generation because adversaries can see, oh, it's one of those special forces guys with one of those phones that doesn't emit any signal, right? So we sort of make it look like a normal consumer phone.

So, again, it's like an ordinary phone. It has all the normal apps, but it doesn't have this third-party tracking. And, of course, it doesn't have Google mobile services, which is a layer on top of Android and any other primary Android device. We don't use Google for things like notifications or maps. There's no Google mobile services on the phone. So it's open-source Android. Our products, our operating system is open-source.

and we don't bring on board Google tracking. So the way to think of it, again, is like there's no silver bullet answer, but it's a lot safer from all of these perspectives. And, you know, our job is just continue developing and innovating in this space. So I think you're going to see a lot in the coming cycles as we release more product here that continues to turn down the noise. You know, and what I would encourage people who are who are considering, getting off of these mainstream privacy unfriendly platforms in which you know

monetization of the customers the purpose I would encourage people to take their time look at options don't take our word for it you know we do a lot of third-party testing read those reports and again I would say like beware of anyone who's saying there's a magic bullet because there's not there's no silver bullet that's gonna like fix everything what there are are better choices we can make and products that are designed for different purposes. So as I mentioned, yeah, as you said, you know, we're building an Indonesia now, we're bringing assembly to the U.S.

And that for us is a big part of where we want ahead, which is not only protect Americans' data, protect our country from all this data being out there, protect our soldiers in war zones from their data being out there, but we really want to bring value back here for Americans to work with their hands because this explosion of money of the tech industry and the the last 15 years has basically benefited a very narrow section of our society in a very limited number of locations in the country. And in other areas that used to do well with manufacturing and building, you know, we see what's happened, which is, you know, decimation. So our goal here is to, you know, bring value back and really start, restart product innovation here in the U.S.

for Americans. There's this trade-off which is described where you have to trade liberty for safety. What you're describing here is achieving more safety through what seems to be actual more liberty as well, which I really like and I want to explore further. This is a really great way to put it, Jan. I think this idea that we've had, especially since the Patriot Act, and we've lived through this ever-encroaching specter of surveillance and how are we going to be safe in this new internet society, right? This theme has come up again and again, like just as you describe it, that our liberty has to be reduced in order for us to be safe. And our founders grappled with this. Again, like, we don't have to look elsewhere for answers. You know, they face these

same questions when they designed our legal system, which protects innocence in such a way that they said, boy, a lot of guilty people are going to go free with the system. They said, yeah, but we need to do that because the much greater risk is the government being able to tyrannize people. So I think we're facing a similar moment that our founders faced, and we get to mimic and learn from their wisdom. That, in fact, by sacrificing liberty in order to get safety, as you said it, we'll have neither.

By insisting on products that protect our liberty, we are also more safe. The same thing that makes us vulnerable to civil liberties violations in the United States from our government, us being profiled as citizens in ways we should never be by the government, makes us vulnerable from the CCP and other adversaries, finding us, tracking us knowing who's arm to twist. I mentioned Yeagley and his work exposing, you know, look, I just bought some data and here's the home addresses of a Delta team. The actual start of that book, which chronicles all of his wild stories, was him pointing out. out many DOD employees who were using an application called Grindr, which is a hookup app for gay guys. And he was saying, hey, listen, let a thousand flowers bloom, your business. However, all of the information from this app tells our adversaries who might be in the closet and not sharing this with their family, meaning they're going to a gay bar and then home with their wife.

That becomes a huge opportunity for an adversary to know, oh, I can put pressure on this guy. And that's just one grain of sand on the beach of data exploits that we're vulnerable to with this third-party data. So, yeah, I think your observation that our path towards constitutional liberty is also our path towards national security in this case. They're not divergent. In fact, they're the same. And not only that, our path towards economic independence is linked here too. All three of these benefits can be gained by us making new decisions here. And that's really what we're trying to promote people to do. If you love our product, great, we're here for you.

If there's other products that accomplish this goal, awesome. But as a country, we need to be innovating and buying products that deliver these benefits for us because these compromises are not safe. I really think we need to be careful of falling into a slumber post-COVID. You know, Elon bought Twitter. We feel like the Internet's free again. It's all okay. You know, we're one guy away from the Internet being CCP.

again. You know, this is, I think, very dangerous. We need to realize how quickly this can change and that we just live through this. So, yeah, this observation that safety, liberty, and financial security are going to come from the same type of direction is central to our mission and our perspective. Before we finish, I keep thinking about this. How much screen time do you let your kids have? Zero. I'm blessed with wonderful children, and we they don't have devices, and they're constantly asking me, my oldest is 11, my youngest is one, the boys are 8 to 11, and I'm constantly hearing, you know, dad, when I turn 15, can I get a phone? Can I get an up phone? I said, son, when you're 18, you can get whatever you want.

So we really limit screen time. I'm blessed to be married to a wonderful woman who teaches our sons and our young daughters great values and we're outside a lot and focus elsewhere. I will say that in a moment of, I don't know if it was weakness, but maybe it was naivety, we were at Target getting some stuff for the babies and all the boys were there and they were so excited about this PS5. And I said, you know what? I was feeling back now, okay, we'll do it. It was like a, I felt like an 80s movie like Chevy Chase.

It's like, okay, we'll buy the video game system. And, I mean, within six weeks, our home was like upside down. The children's attitude has completely changed. They were fighting each other for this, yelling at me if they didn't get enough video games. Oh, no, he got more time than I did. I mean, it was crazy. And I had to sit them down and say, hey, guys, I have to repent. I made a horrible decision for you.

And I'm going to remove this video game thing. So now the video game system lives in my closet on top of my gun. unsafe you know in the back and you know it's so funny you know hey dad on my on my birthday can we bring it back out like they're still they're still asking so I think I raised that that anecdote because it really showed us in our family how how much how addictive the screen time can be how much it can change their attitudes and really like I'm at the top of the list of people who need to work on this which is one of the big most important day-to-day benefits like we just described all these civilizational distinctions around the smartphone platforms and how to protect

our country and protect our data for me the big difference in this is this because our product does not make money on me using it you're going to notice as you use it it has a feature at the top level called time away which tells you how long since you open the phone and we're encouraging customers like go longer don't open it leave me down because I've noticed myself you know I I'm a busy person I'm, you know, hey, did I get that email? What happened to that deal? Oh, no, where's that release at? I'm really hooked on looking at the phone.

As great pastor, Timothy Keller once said, you know, phones allow us to work anywhere, so we work everywhere. I have this problem. And I've noticed this at home. My wife will make a beautiful dinner. We're all sitting there eating, and I'm looking at the phone. So this little feature, time away, gives me a meter to say, I'm going to put this in my pocket. and I'm so excited because I'm going to come back after dinner and it's going to say I haven't looked at the phone in like 85 minutes.

Let's make it 90. And the same at church. I love being able to go to church and not look at my phone and have my phone almost reward me for this thing I'm building, which is my time away from it. So I think this small thing, it's the tip of the iceberg of difference. If the product I'm using works for me and is reflecting value to me, which is don't Pick me up. Focus on your family. That is, you know, the Bible says, you can tell the tree by its fruit. That's fruit. When I'm sitting down for dinner every day for an hour and 90 minutes,

whatever, and I'm not looking at my phone, that is the expression of a product that is built on a different genetic code. And there's all these other downstream benefits. My data is not leaking, but like for me, that difference is it. Is my kids now have a more focused present dad during dinner. And the value of that, like, man, if we're going to turn our country around, it's going to start with that. You know, step one, put down the phone. Step two, maybe find a different platform that isn't, you know, paying our adversaries to spy on us. So, yeah, for me, it's been a big difference. Well, Joe Weil, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Jan, thank you so much. It's been a delight to be here.

Thank you all for joining Joe Weil and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellick. Thank you.