Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The Real Reason Your Insurance Just Went Up

Episode Date: August 29, 2025

Go to https://joindeleteme.com/TAYLOR20 and use my code TAYLOR20 at checkout for 20% off! SUPPORT ME ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzBuy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co Data brokers vacuum up information about us, what we buy, where we drive, what we watch, when we sleep, where we worship, and, increasingly, information about our faces and bodies and how we move through the world. They stitch these fragments into profiles that are bought, sold, licensed, and shared by advertisers, insurers, political campaigns, hedge funds, and even government agencies. In part two of my series on data brokers I dive into all the crazy ways data brokers harvest your information and how they're doing it in extremely sneaky ways!! I promise this will shock you and you might think twice before doing some daily activities. Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

If you've ever thought about any personal detail of your life and thought, wait, can that be tracked? The short answer is almost always yes, and that is the tip of the iceberg. When you look at something like a weather forecasting app, a loyalty punch card, a TV menu, a free flashlight app, or a smart car feature, those things are just the front door to an enormous and largely invisible industry called data brokering. Data brokers vacuum up information about us, like what we buy, where we drive, what we we watch, where we go pray, where we sleep, and increasingly information about our faces and bodies as well, how we move through the world, how we walk. They stitch these fragments of information

together into profiles that are bought, sold, licensed, and shared by advertisers, insurers, political campaigns, hedge funds, and even government agencies. On this week's Free Speech Friday, we're going to dig into part two of my series on data brokers. I'm going to be diving into all the crazy ways that data brokers harvest your information. And before you're like, boring, boring, I know my data's being tracked. What do I have to learn? I already know. Everyone's tracking me everywhere on the web, blah, blah, blah. Yes, you are right. But companies are actually harvesting a lot more data on you than you might think. And they're actually doing it in such incredibly sneaky ways. So I'll be digging into that. I'll also be talking about how anonymized data can

still be linked back to you. For instance, if you think you're doing something in an anonymous browser, not so anonymous. So we'll be getting into all of that today. I want to start with the phone, our cell phones. Smartphones are the core of modern surveillance capitalism. Location data is actually the most valuable data that can be bought. Many apps sometimes constantly collect this data through third-party software development kits called SDKs. Those SDKs can pass basically like a stream about your location to add networks, analytics firms, and more. In January 2024, the Fed, Trade Commission uncovered this scheme, actually, where one data broker called OutLogic was selling and sharing highly sensitive location data that could actually track people's

individual visits to reproductive health care clinics, domestic violence shelters. The FTC filed an order against the company, but this is just one company out of countless more, and I'm sure you can only imagine how that data could be weaponized against someone. journalists and advocates have long been sounding the alarm about law enforcement agencies using commercial data to sidestep warrant requirements. The AP and the EFF documented police use of a tool called fog reveal, a portal that ingests app-derived data location data sets. So basically they buy these massive data sets from data brokers. And then they let police officers explore people's movements across hundreds of millions of devices. so they can just track anyone basically really easily.

So your phone is a huge liability, even if you have an Apple phone. But outside of the phone itself, I want to talk about the things that we do on our phone. A lot of people think that their email messages are private. And I get why they think that. You log into your email inbox. It seems like this sort of private space.

Of course, people understand Google has access to some information, but they don't realize what else is going on under the hood. Do you remember unroll.me? I actually used this service. It was a service that promised to like clean up your inbox. It was actually caught mining receipts from users' emails and selling those competitive insights to Uber so Uber could track how many people were riding Lyft.

Things like order confirmations, receipts, shipping notices are like gold to data brokers because this information reveals what you bought along with brand preferences, sizes, prices, returns, and basically documents your broader household spending patterns. If those get linked with your device ID or loyalty account, they know so much about you. Like they know a lot more than just that you bought shoes. They know your shoe size, your budget,

maybe that you returned to pairs suggesting health issues or mobility problems. That data could then be used by insurance companies to charge you higher premiums or medical companies to target you with expensive treatments. Imagine data harvested from your email inbox shows a pattern of buying antidepressants from an online pharmacy.

That data could affect your job prospects, insurance coverage or it could be leveraged against you in a custody battle. And you might be thinking like, wait, isn't that protected by HIPAA? No, HIPA only covers certain entities like your doctor or hospital, but almost all apps that traffic in health data aren't covered at all. This means things like period tracking apps, mental health apps, fitness apps, wearables. They're all harvesting health information on you pretty much 24-7. Flow health, one of the most popular period tracking apps, got caught sharing sensitive data with

third parties. Good RX, a telemedicine coupon app, shared prescription data with advertisers. And they actually faced a pretty historic FTC action in 2023 over this. Better help, the counseling platform was caught leaking details about users' mental health to advertisers. So imagine you use a therapy app because you're having postpartum depression. That data leaks. Now Facebook thinks that you're emotionally vulnerable and starts showing you ads for high interest loans or your employer partners with a wellness vendor who buys those insights and quietly flags you as at risk. I just want you guys to understand that data can be used to affect like real material things in your livelihood and your family as well, by the way, because they harvest data not just

from you, but on your whole family. When the data broker finds you, they find everyone you're connected to. And I promise you, by the way, later in this video, I will tell you some ways to make yourself safer. So if you're watching this, like, God, I'm watching another depressing Taylor Doom video about data privacy. Like, why won't she shut up and tell me anything? Like, don't worry, I'm going to tell you some things to do. And I'm also going to have a totally separate episode after this that has a little bit more insight. So don't feel depressed. But let's step out of the app world for a second and talk about just general web activity because people browse the web all day long. I think most

people are on the web pretty frequently for work no matter what their job. And they're probably not thinking too much about the tracking that's happening. They know like they're being monitored because everyone knows that websites are being tracked. But they sort of think, oh, well, you know, I'll accept these cookies because it's just going to give me better targeted ads and who cares. But things are a lot more insidious than that. Nearly every page you visit is studded with pixels. And these are these tiny little invisible images or scripts and they silently basically like record everything you're doing online and they send it to advertisers. They capture the URL that you're on. The buttons you click. Sometimes even the information that you're typing into forms is captured. In 2022, the markup

revealed that Facebook's Metapixel was secretly embedded on hospital websites and even inside private patient portals. So this means that when someone was scheduling an appointment for like an oncology visit or when they were searching for pregnancy-related healthcare, that really sensitive data was sent back to meta. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

issued a guidance warning hospitals, but then the courts ended up rolling back a lot of that guidance. Nicholson Price, a University of Michigan law professor who studies big data and health care told the markup, quote, this is an extreme example of exactly how far the tentacles of big tech reach into what we think of as protected data space. The online ad industry runs on something called real-time bidding, meaning that every single time you load a web page or fire up your phone,

your location, browsing history, and inferences about you, like your income and your health and all this stuff, gets broadcast to thousands of ad companies in milliseconds. Meaning basically, like, thousands of companies have access to your data in order to bid on it. It's not just the winner of the bidding war who gets access to your data. Like, your data gets exposed through this bidding process because all of the bidders have to kind of see the quality of the data and what it is to price it. European regulators have called this a complete, quote, privacy crisis. So imagine you look up resources about debt relief.

Ad networks and data brokers now know, and they can resell your information to lenders who will then jack up your rates. maybe that data that you're looking up from debt relief resources is revealed to a potential bank, and it is used to deny you alone. This is how these data sets are used to target us and affect our lives. And obviously, you know, like our phones and websites are tracking us, but now we have this whole thing where homes are getting smart. So I want to talk about smart devices because that smart washer, that smart laundry system, the smart thermostat, don't even get me started on ring cameras. In 2023, FTC forced Amazon's ring to overhaul its policies after reports emerged that employees and contractors had inappropriate access to customers' private videos. That means the

private videos captured on your ring camera. Amazon Alexa faced a $25 million penalty for retaining children's voice recordings and location data longer than promised. So they're capturing very sensitive things, like your child's voice, who's coming to your doorstep, like all of this data is just not being protected. In 2022, MIT Technology Review revealed that test versions of iRobot's Roomba vacuums snapped images inside people's homes, images that ended up on social media and then in AI training sets. So imagine a hacker gets access to your doorbell camera or sees when your kids come home alone or a contractor is reviewing like test footage and shares intimate pictures from your bedroom.

I just want people to understand that like once this data leaves your device, you don't know where it's going or who's getting access to it. If contractors and employees at these companies are getting access to customers' data or like their live videos from Amazon Ring and stuff like that, you can trust that these companies are not good stewards of your data. Most new TVs come with a hidden tracking feature called automatic content recognition. And basically the TV itself takes little snapshots of whatever you're watching, even if it's from your cable box or a DVD or like a gaming console.

And it sends that information back to the manufacturer or its partners. So they keep track of what shows or what ads you watched. And they link it to other devices in your home, like your phone or your laptop. So it could be linked to things like your purchase history, you know, by syncing it with credit card data. And this is a way that they can basically prove to advertisers. Look, this person saw your commercial on their TV and then they bought your product later. And then they can charge, you know, a higher price for it.

In 2017, Vizio, TV company, paid $2.2 million to settle allegations that it's secretly collected viewing data from 11 million TV. And instead of killing ACR, basically this just normalized it within the industry. And now there's like no guardrails around it. Pretty much all of these smart TVs engage in this type of data collection. So imagine your child is watching a lot of shows about autism. Suddenly targeted ads for therapies or experimental treatments are following around your household on all these other devices.

It has the potential to expose so many intimate details of your life. And even if you try to minimize your footprint at home, your internet service provider also sees everything and also harvests data. In 2024, the FCC fined major U.S. carriers nearly $200 million for illegally selling real-time location data to aggregators. This included data about where people slept, shopped, who they visited. Imagine someone buys a data set that shows your phone spends three nights a week at an address that is in your home.

That data could be used to expose private relationships, trips to clinic, visits to other places that you don't want made public. And speaking of driving, cars are also these like roving. surveillance devices. I made a video a couple months ago about Waymos and how much data that they're collecting around them, but the cars themselves are also collecting a massive amount of data on you, the driver or the passenger. Telemetrics systems log how fast you're driving, how hard you break, whether you wear your seatbelt, where you go. Some of them even log voice commands. Mozilla called cars, quote, the worst product category for privacy it had ever reviewed.

In 2024, it came out that General Motors was sharing driving behavior data, from its on-star smart driver program with data brokers. Insurance companies used that data to adjust people's rates without drivers realizing that it was happening. This video is brought to you by Delete Me. As a high-profile journalist dealing with stalking, death threats, harassment, and more, I know how crucial it is to protect your privacy online.

Unfortunately, no matter how careful you are, data brokers will collect and sell your personal information to anyone willing to pay for it. This includes your name, address, phone number, and more. When someone buys your data through a broker, they don't just see you. They see your spouse, your parents, your loved ones, anyone you're connected to. Removing this information off the internet helps keep you safe from things like identity theft and stalking. But how do you remove your information from the web when there are thousands of data brokers?

Delete me is a subscription service that will automatically remove your personal information being sold online. It's been an absolute game changer for me as somebody that values privacy. Delete me scours the internet for your information and handles takedown request. They provide regular privacy reports so you can see how much data they found on you, where it was found, and where it was removed. You can even make custom removal requests. Their family plans are especially crucial because when you're targeted, your loved ones usually are too. Get 20% off DeleteMe Consumer Plans when you go to JoinDeletMe.com slash Taylor 20 and use promo code Taylor 20 at checkout. That's Join DeleteMe.com slash Taylor 20 and use code Taylor 20 at checkout.

Don't wait until it's too late to safeguard your privacy. Make sure your data and your families stays protected. I feel like I'm going crazy with this video where I'm like, everything around us is tracking us. But I think a lot of us, especially with cars, we think of cars as these like old school machines, at least if you drive a clunker like I do. But it's like imagine if you run a few yellow lights or you break too hard in traffic.

Now your insurance premium spikes and you have to pay $150 more per month because an AI algorithm harvesting your car data considers that you're reckless. Or what if a future employer buys that driving data and decides that you're too risky to hire for a delivery job. And if there's one more thing I can just talk about for a second, that's so, so bad when it comes to privacy, is loyalty programs. I don't sign up for any loyalty programs for this reason.

Because I know everyone signs up to them to get discounts and free miles and coupons. But let me tell you the problems with loyalty schemes. Because, you know, for all the rewards they give you, trust me when I say they're getting something much more valuable in return. Kroger and Walmart do not just sell groceries. They literally sell these prediction. algorithms that they've created to advertisers. So they can target lapsed cereal buyers in a five-mile radius or households who just started buying prenatal vitamins. And then those insights ripple

across the web into streaming ads. And they just show up in all these crazy ways that you would never imagine. So imagine you buy nicotine gum every week and you pay with your loyalty card, you know, to get the 5% discount. A predatory cigarette company could infer that you're a smoker trying to quit and target you with ads to make it harder. Or you're buying baby formula before telling your boss that you're pregnant and then ads for maternity leave lawyers start following you around and you end up with like a workplace discrimination suit if that information comes out. You're just exposed to a lot more potential bad outcomes than you might think. And all of this terrible stuff, this is stuff that these data brokers can do with data that

they're tracking now. But you know that big push for age verification that's happening online that I've been talking about? As I've reported many times over, none of this is about child safety. These laws about age verification, identity verification, they're about rewarding big tech and these predatory data harvesters with the most valuable data yet. That is biometric data. This is something they all want to get their hands on. Age verification systems inherently expose this data. People have to scan their faces, for instance, to use Spotify in some cases in the

UK because of these child privacy laws. Biometric data is on another level from the type of data that we have now. Right now, they're harvesting a lot of data about the activity, the things that we do, the places we go, but they're not harvesting it as much about us. Like they're not getting actual scans of our faces that they can analyze and use against us as easily. All of that will change if these age verification laws pass. And I think a lot of people also don't realize why information about your face is so valuable. Like they think, well, my face is out there. It's probably being recorded all over. You know, I uploaded to photo apps. In 2021, the FTC forced ever album, a photo storage and sharing app to delete hordes of face

embeddings that it had collected without proper consent. It turned out that it was also training algorithms on that data. And then there's Clearview AI, which scraped billions of photos from the public web to create this face search engine for law enforcement. Imagine being falsely flagged by a facial recognition system in a retail store and ending up in jail. This false smash also gets suddenly added to a data broker's database and suddenly you're high risk. The error follows you across your life and employers and police records. Once your biometric data is tainted, and this can happen quite easily, you can't change your face like you can change a password. And data brokers aren't even just selling our raw data anymore. As AI systems proliferate,

they're selling data in order to predict the likelihood of things. So they'll harvest all this data and then they'll predict the likelihood that you'll have financial distress or your propensity to protest or your potential religious affiliation. Anyway, I promised you, after freaking you out, If you've made it towards the end of this video and you're like, what can I do? What can I do? Aside from signing up for Delete Me, which is the sponsor of this video. I want to get into some stuff that you can do kind of right now. The first thing is turn off the always on location for apps that you don't need it for.

So when you go to your iPhone settings or your, you know, settings on Android, just watch out. Look at your weather apps, coupon apps, flashlight apps. These things often monetize your location. I found out a flashlight app recently was having my location. So go check and make sure that only the most essential apps have location. Number two is limit ad tracking on iOS. On iPhone, you can go to the app tracking transparency center and reset tighter settings on Android. I think you go to reset limit ID.

You can Google. But basically, just limit ad tracking as much as you can on your phone. Use privacy focused browsers and extensions that block third party trackers. That is also really helpful. Turn off ACR on your T-Bron. and review your TV's privacy settings. It sounds crazy to be like your TV has privacy settings, but they're usually buried somewhere in your TV's system preferences.

Many models bury the ACR opt-outs pretty deep into their menus, but they should be there if you have a modern TV. If you've bought it in the last couple of years, it's probably there. Also, audit your car's privacy dashboard. Make sure that you turn off telematics consent and mobile app permissions. If there's a driver's score feature, assume that that will be shared with insurance companies. turn that feature off. Turn that feature off. Your car does not need to be scoring you on your driving.

Also, when you upload any video or image of your face or voice, assume that that will be living forever on the internet. Even if you're promised permanent deletion, only share what you can live with being public basically forever. And finally, exercise your rights. If you're in states with privacy laws like California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, many others, submit deletion requests to these data brokers. Like I've said, a million times in this video, I use Delete Me. It's really great. I've literally used it for eight years before they even sponsored me. But the most important thing you could do, I would argue, in terms of fixing this broader system, is join the fight for data privacy, fight back against things like age verification

and surveillance capitalism. Do not let anyone tell you that these crackdowns on social media content or short form video or banning cell phones in schools while also installing AI facial recognition tracking systems is ever about child safety or any kind of safety. We can all advocate for things like bans on selling precise location data, algorithmic transparency, and massive fines for carriers that leak data. Convenience and personalization are this like sugarcoding that makes this constant corporate surveillance palpable. But these things are very bad. And so we need to recognize that they're bad and fight back, especially against these bad tech laws. Thanks again to delete me for

sponsoring this video. To get your data removed from the internet, check out join delete me.com and use code Taylor 20 at checkout for 20% off. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to subscribe to my tech and online culture newsletter, usermag.co. That's usermag.com where I write about all this stuff and more. Also, please support me on Patreon. I'm just Taylor Lorenz on Patreon. I don't really have many advertisers aside from Delete me. So every dollar really does make a huge difference and it lets me cover this stuff. And I have a lot more planned. I'm going to be speaking to some specific privacy experts to in my future videos about like what we're going to do.

I don't want my videos to be all doom and gloom. I had to get like one more doom and gloom video in there. I just wanted to run through all the ways that people are tracking because I think one comment that I've gotten on this data broker series, the first episode that I did is like, I know my website's tracking me. I know my phone is tracking me. And it's like you, I don't think you do know. I think you know the tip of the iceberg.

And I think if people did know what was tracking, I would like to think that we would have more outrage because I'm like, we don't want these predictive pricing algorithms charging us more and, you know, messing with our insurance premiums and giving us higher prices on groceries. Like all of these things are so bad. And we can literally fix them. We can literally pass laws to make sure that this is not the world that we live in. So thank you so much for getting involved in the fight for privacy and freedom on the internet. And I will see you next week.