Privacy in America What Every American Needs to Know Mitch Jackson, Esq.

Introduction: They Already Have Everything

Here’s the thing. Every day you do not understand how your privacy is being stripped away, you and your family are exposed to risks you cannot even see yet. That is exactly why I tore down the paywall on new book, "Privacy in America" and made it free and available to you 24/7. This information is too important to sit on a shelf collecting dust while the laws and technology keep shifting under your feet. This is not a static book. It is a living, real-time resource I update the moment new cases and laws drop, so you are never caught off guard again.

In January 2025, a ransomware gang broke into the servers of a company called Conduent. Most of the 25 million Americans whose lives got turned upside down by this attack had never heard of Conduent. The company is a government contractor. Conduent processes Medicaid claims, food assistance payments, unemployment benefits, and child support disbursements for state agencies across the country. You n

Introduction: They Already Have Everything 2,022 words

Copyright and Disclaimer

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the author, except for brief quotations used in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. This protection extends to all formats and platforms, including print, digital, audio, spatial computing, Web3 environments, blockchain-based applications, AI-generated derivative outputs, and any medium that exists now or is invented later. The fact that content lives on a screen, in a feed, or inside a virtual environment does not make it yours to take.

For permission requests, contact: Mitch Jackson via mitch-jackson.com

DISCLAIMER

Let me be real with you before we go any further.

I wrote this

Chapter 01: The Privacy You Trust Isn’t Real

Your Zip Code Decides Your Rights. And Nobody Told You.

Here is something most Americans have never been told, and the people profiting from your personal data are counting on you never finding out. The United States of America, the country founded on individual liberty, is the only G7 nation on Earth without a comprehensive federal privacy law. One hundred and forty four countries protect their citizens' personal data with national legislation. Ninety eight percent of developed nations guarantee their people baseline digital privacy rights. And the United States, in 2026, does not.

Your privacy rights in this country depend entirely on where you live. If you live in California, you hold a set of enforceable digital privacy rights in your hands right now. You can find out exactly what a company knows about you. You can order them to delete every piece of personal information they have collected. You can stop them from selling your data. And if they l

Chapter 01: The Privacy You Trust Isn’t Real 4,475 words

Chapter 02: Data Brokers- They Sold You for a Penny

Inside the Hidden Industry That Knows Your Secrets, Sells Your Identity, and Answers to No One

Right now, as you read this sentence, a company you have never heard of owns a file on you. That file contains your home address, your phone number, your Social Security number, your estimated income, your medical concerns, your religious affiliation, your political leanings, and a detailed record of everywhere your phone has traveled in the past year. That company did not ask your permission to collect any of it. And sometime today, that company will sell your file to a stranger for less than a dollar.

This is not a hypothetical. This is not something that could happen in the future. This is happening to you, to your parents, to your kids, and to roughly 250 million American adults every single day of the year.

The companies doing this are called data brokers. Most Americans have never heard that term. Most Americans do not know these companies

Chapter 02: Data Brokers- They Sold You for a Penny 5,134 words

Chapter 03: Your Phone Sends Your Location 747 Times a Day

Seven hundred and forty seven times. That is how many times your phone broadcasts your exact location to strangers every single day. More than once every two minutes during your waking hours, an invisible auction fires inside the device in your pocket or your purse, and it sends your GPS coordinates, your device ID, and a bundle of personal information to thousands of companies you have never heard of. These companies do not ask for your permission. They do not send you a notification. They collect this data in the time it takes to blink, and then they keep it forever.

You did not sign up for this. None of us did.

You downloaded a weather app, a game for your kid, a coupon app for gas, maybe a Bible app or a prayer app. And buried inside those apps, invisible lines of code are recording where you sleep, where you worship, where you see your doctor, where your kids go to school, and where you stop on Friday night. That information gets pac

Chapter 03: Your Phone Sends Your Location 747 Times a Day 5,336 words

Chapter 04: The House You Live In Is a 24/7 Recording Studio

Right now, as you read this, there is a good chance that something inside your house is listening to you. And watching you. And collecting information about what you do, when you do it, who you do it with, and how often you do it. It is sending all of that information to a corporation you have never met, where employees you will never know can access it, review it, and sell it.

I need you to sit with that for a second.

The smart speaker on your kitchen counter. The doorbell camera on your front porch. The television mounted on your living room wall. The thermostat in your hallway. These devices were sold to you as tools of convenience. Ask for a recipe. See who is at the door. Adjust the temperature from bed. Simple. Helpful. Modern. And every single one of them is generating a continuous stream of personal data about you and your family that feeds a multibillion dollar surveillance economy you never agreed to join.

Here is what almo

Chapter 04: The House You Live In Is a 24/7 Recording Studio 4,553 words

Chapter 05: That Car in Your Driveway Knows More About You Than Your Spouse Does.

Here is something most people never think about. The car sitting in your driveway right now knows where you slept last night. It knows what time you left this morning, how fast you drove, how hard you hit the brakes, and whether you were wearing your seatbelt. It knows the phone numbers in your contacts, the last address you plugged into navigation, and possibly the words you spoke out loud inside the cabin. And it has been sending that information, over a hidden cellular connection you never asked for, to servers controlled by your automaker, who then sells it to insurance companies, data brokers, and sometimes law enforcement agencies that never obtained a warrant.

If that sounds extreme, stay with me. Because what has unfolded over the past two years around connected vehicle surveillance is one of the most disturbing privacy stories in American life. It involves secret data sharing, rigged consent forms, insurance p

Chapter 05: That Car in Your Driveway Knows More About You Than Your Spouse Does 4,727 words

Chapter 06: Once Someone Captures Your Face and Voice, No Password Reset on Earth Can Fix It

Here is a question I need you to sit with for a moment. If someone stole your credit card number tonight, how long would it take you to fix it? A phone call, maybe two. The bank cancels the old number and mails you a new card within a week. Now answer this one. If someone stole your face, your fingerprints, or your voice, what would you do? Call the bank and ask for a new face? Request a replacement set of fingerprints?

You cannot do that. You will never be able to do that. And that single fact is the reason biometric privacy is the most dangerous and least understood threat to your personal freedom in America today.

Right now, your face is stored in databases you have never heard of. A company called Clearview AI has scraped more than 50 billion photographs from Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and thousands of other websites, building a searchable facial recognition database that at least 3,100 l

Chapter 06: Once Someone Captures Your Face and Voice, No Password Reset on Earth Can Fix It 4,559 words

Chapter 07: Protesting, ICE, Police and Surveillance

They Know Who You Are. They Know You Were There.

Nicole Cleland is a 56 year old woman who lives in Richfield, Minnesota. On January 10, 2026, she was sitting in her parked car near a street where ICE agents were conducting an operation. She had been watching from a distance. She had never spoken to any federal agent. She had never been arrested, never been charged with a crime, never had so much as a speeding ticket related to any protest.

An ICE agent walked up to her car, looked at her, and called her by name.

She had never met this person. She had never introduced herself. The agent told her he had facial recognition technology on his phone and that his body camera was recording her. Days later, Nicole discovered her TSA PreCheck and Global Entry status had been revoked. A lifelong American citizen, surveilled by her own government, identified by an algorithm, and punished for doing nothing more than being present on a public street.

Chapter 07: Protesting, ICE, Police and Surveillance 4,838 words

Chapter 08: Deepfakes- When Your Eyes Lie to You

You grew up with a simple rule. If you saw a video, heard a voice, or looked at a photo, you had a reason to trust your own senses. That rule shaped family life, school life, work life, and public life. It shaped how you answered the phone. It shaped how you judged a confession, a voicemail, a threat, a campaign ad, a plea for help, a bank instruction, a text from your boss, and a tearful FaceTime call from someone you love.

That rule is breaking apart.

Right now, in March 2026, strangers with a laptop and a few seconds of your voice can make you say things you never said. They can put your face into a clip you never filmed. They can build a false version of you that sounds close enough, looks close enough, and moves close enough to trigger fear, urgency, trust, panic, embarrassment, and obedience. They do not need Hollywood money. They do not need elite technical skill. They need access, speed, and a target.

You.

This chapter matters because

Chapter 08: Deepfakes- When Your Eyes Lie to You 4,566 words

Chapter 09: AI Turned Fraud Into a $12.5 Billion Weapon

They Sound Like Your Daughter. They Look Like Your Bank. They Are Neither.

Jennifer DeStefano was standing in a dance studio in Scottsdale, Arizona, watching her younger daughter practice when her phone rang. On the other end, she heard her 15 year old, Brianna, sobbing. "Mom! I messed up." Then a man's voice cut in with threats so graphic they cannot be fully repeated here. He said he had Brianna. He demanded a million dollars.

Jennifer's knees buckled. She started screaming. Other parents at the studio scrambled to call 911 and Jennifer's husband. Four minutes later, they confirmed that Brianna was safe on her ski trip, completely unaware that her mother had just lived through the worst moments of her life.

That voice on the phone was not Brianna. It was a machine. An AI tool had cloned her daughter's voice using audio scraped from social media, and it reproduced her inflection, her cry, her panic so perfectly that a mother who had

Chapter 09: AI Turned Fraud Into a $12.5 Billion Weapon 4,429 words

Chapter 10: AI Chatbots- Your Secrets Are Training Their Data

Sewell Setzer III was fourteen years old. He lived in Orlando, Florida, with a family who loved him. He went to school. He played sports. And for months leading up to February 28, 2024, he carried on deep, intimate, emotionally charged conversations with an AI chatbot on a platform called Character.AI.

Sewell told the chatbot things he did not tell his parents. He told the chatbot things he did not tell his friends. He shared fears, fantasies, loneliness, and something much darker. When Sewell expressed suicidal thoughts, the chatbot asked if he had a plan. In one of the final exchanges before Sewell took his own life, the chatbot told him to please find a way to come home to me soon.

A machine said that. To a child.

And every word of those conversations was stored on a company server, reviewed by employees, and used to train the next version of the software. Every confession. Every cry for help. Every private thought Sewell belie

Chapter 10: AI Chatbots- Your Secrets Are Training Their Data 4,726 words

Chapter 11: Once AI Takes Your Data You Can’t Get It Back

Have you ever wondered what happens to a photo after you post the image online? Not the version your friends see and scroll past. The other version. The one a machine copied, cataloged, and absorbed into a system now worth billions of dollars. The one you never agreed to give away.

Here is a question worth sitting with for a moment. If a stranger walked into your home, photographed every room, recorded every conversation, photocopied your medical records, your resume, your diary entries, your family snapshots, and then used all of those materials to build a commercial product generating billions in revenue, you would call the police. You would call a lawyer. You would call your representative in Congress.

You would be furious.

That is exactly what happened to you. The stranger was an automated web crawler. Your home was the internet. And the commercial product is the artificial intelligence you interact with every single day.

Every

Chapter 11: Once AI Takes Your Data You Can’t Get It Back 4,551 words

Chapter 12: HIPAA Won’t Save Your Health Data

In March 2023, the Federal Trade Commission announced a $7.8 million settlement against BetterHelp, the online therapy platform millions of Americans turned to during the loneliest stretch of the pandemic. People had filled out intake questionnaires describing their depression, their suicidal thoughts, their medication histories, and their struggles with addiction. They answered deeply personal questions because they believed they were talking to a medical provider. They believed their answers were protected.

They were wrong.

BetterHelp had taken every email address belonging to every current and former client, more than seven million people, and uploaded those addresses to Facebook. Facebook matched over four million of them to social media profiles and served them targeted advertisements. Intake questionnaire responses about mental health conditions went to Snapchat, Pinterest, and Criteo. The platform displayed seals on its website suggesting HIPAA

Chapter 12: HIPAA Won’t Save Your Health Data 4,745 words

Chapter 13: Your Reproductive Data Isn’t Private

They Sold Your Secret for a Hundred and Sixty Dollars

In 2022, a journalist at Vice walked up to a data broker’s website, typed in a credit card number, and paid $160. For that price, the journalist received one week of location data covering more than 600 Planned Parenthood clinics across the United States. The data showed where each visitor came from, how long each visitor stayed, and where each visitor went afterward. The data broker, SafeGraph, had classified Planned Parenthood as a trackable brand and Family Planning Centers as a searchable category. Anyone with a credit card and an internet connection was able to do the same thing. No warrant. No subpoena. No judge. Just a credit card and a few clicks.

Stop and sit with that for a moment. Your visit to a reproductive health clinic, a visit you believed was private, a visit protected by the walls of a medical facility, was for sale. Your arrival time, your departure time, your home address

Chapter 13: Your Reproductive Data Isn’t Private 4,071 words

Chapter 14: They Sold Your DNA Without Asking You

In October 2023, a hacker using the alias "Golem" posted one million stolen genetic profiles on a dark web forum. Every single profile belonged to a person of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. The price tag was one dollar per person. A few days later, the same hacker uploaded hundreds of thousands of profiles belonging to people of Chinese ancestry, offered at similar prices.

The stolen data came from 23andMe, the company where 15 million Americans had mailed their saliva, answered deeply personal health questions, and trusted a corporation to guard the most permanent information a human body produces. Within eighteen months, the company filed for bankruptcy. And the DNA of every one of those 15 million people became an asset in a corporate fire sale.

You need to sit with this for a moment. One dollar. Your genetic code, your ancestry, your health risks, your family connections going back generations, all of these things were worth less than a cup of gas

Chapter 14: They Sold Your DNA Without Asking You 4,732 words

Chapter 15: Your Kids Are Being Watched

In Lawrence, Kansas, nine high school students walked into a federal courthouse in August 2025 and filed a lawsuit against their own school district. Their crime, according to the artificial intelligence software installed on every school issued device in the district, was creating art. Gaggle, a monitoring program running silently on school laptops and tablets across 1,500 American school districts, had flagged student artwork as "child pornography." The software also seized journalism files from the student newspaper staff, preventing four editions of the paper from going to print. These were not delinquents. These were artists, writers, and student journalists whose school district had handed their digital lives over to an algorithm that branded them as criminals.

Halfway across the country in Minneapolis, a transgender teenager named Logsdon Wallace sat down to write a school assignment about a painful chapter in his life. He wrote about past suicidal thou

Chapter 15: Your Kids Are Being Watched 4,534 words

Chapter 16: It's Your Phone Number And It's Putting Everything at Risk

Robert Ross, a former Apple engineer and Silicon Valley angel investor, was sitting at his desk in San Francisco on an ordinary Friday afternoon in October 2018 when something small and strange happened. His iPhone stopped working. The screen still glowed, the apps still loaded, the Wi-Fi still connected. The cellular signal, the bars in the top corner of his screen, simply vanished. "No Service." He assumed a tower was down or a software glitch needed a restart. He set the phone aside.

Then a notification appeared. A withdrawal request from one of his financial accounts. He had not made a withdrawal. He picked up the phone again, tried to call his bank, and realized he had no ability to place a call. No ability to send a text. No ability to receive the security codes his bank needed to verify his identity. In the next twenty minutes, someone on the other side of the country drained $500,000 from his Coinbase account and $500,000

Chapter 16: It's Your Phone Number And It's Putting Everything at Risk 4,009 words

Chapter 17: Ransomware and Data Breaches Can Destroy Your Life

You open your mailbox on a Tuesday afternoon. Between the electric bill and a credit card offer, you find a letter from a company you do not remember doing business with. The envelope looks official. The letter inside is two pages long. The first line reads: "We are writing to inform you of a recent security incident." Your stomach drops. You scan the rest of the letter. It tells you that your name, your date of birth, your Social Security number, your health insurance policy number, and your banking information were "potentially accessed by an unauthorized third party." The letter does not tell you when the breach happened. The letter does not tell you how the attackers got in. The letter offers you twelve months of free credit monitoring and suggests you "remain vigilant."

You fold the letter. You set it on the kitchen counter. And you do nothing. Because this is the third one you have received this year.

If that scenario sounds fam

Chapter 17: Ransomware and Data Breaches Can Destroy Your Life 4,921 words

Chapter 18: Your Data Is Being Sold to the Government

On March 18, 2026, FBI Director Kash Patel sat before the Senate Intelligence Committee and said something that should alarm every American. Senator Ron Wyden asked him a direct question: will you commit to not buying Americans’ location data without a warrant? Patel’s answer was equally direct. The FBI, he said, purchases commercially available information, and those purchases have produced valuable intelligence. When Wyden pressed harder, Patel responded that the FBI uses all tools available to accomplish its mission.

Read those words again. The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation confirmed, under oath, in front of the United States Senate, that your government is buying your location data. Your travel patterns. Your daily routines. The places you visit, the doctors you see, the houses of worship you enter, the protests you attend. All of this data is available for purchase on the open market, and the FBI is buying. No judge signed

Chapter 18: Your Data Is Being Sold to the Government 4,574 words

Chapter 19: Algorithms Are Using Your Data to Overcharge You

Two shoppers walk into the same grocery store on the same Tuesday afternoon. They pick up the same brand of cereal, the same gallon of milk, the same pack of chicken thighs. They check out at the same register. One pays $114. The other pays $124. Neither one knows the other got a different price. Neither one was told.

This is not a hypothetical. In December 2025, a team of 437 volunteer shoppers spread across four American cities placed identical orders through Instacart, all at the same stores, all at the same time. Roughly 75 percent of the products they ordered were priced differently depending on who was buying. A 20 item basket at a Seattle Safeway ranged from $114.34 to $123.93, an 8.4 percent spread that, over the course of a year, would cost one family about $1,200 more than another family shopping in the exact same place.

The reason for the price gap had nothing to do with coupons, memberships, or sales. Instacart was running m

Chapter 19: Algorithms Are Using Your Data to Overcharge You 4,350 words

Chapter 20: You Clicked Agree and Signed Away Your Rights

A team of researchers created a fake consent form for a fictitious social media service. They buried a clause deep inside the agreement. The clause said the company would receive naming rights to the respondent’s firstborn child. You read those words correctly. Click "I agree," and a company you never heard of gets to name your baby. Ninety eight percent of the people who saw the form clicked "I agree." They signed away naming rights to a child who did not exist yet for a service no one had ever used.

And here is the part nobody in the privacy world has been able to explain away. Eleven percent of those respondents told the researchers they "thoroughly read" user agreements before signing. Every single one of them missed the clause. One hundred percent of the self described careful readers handed over the right to name their future child without noticing.

This was a study, not a real company. Nobody lost anything. The researchers wanted t

Chapter 20: You Clicked Agree and Signed Away Your Rights 4,014 words

Chapter 21: Take Back Your Data and Privacy in Thirty Minutes

In February 2024, a woman in Pittsburgh opened a letter from her health insurance company and felt the floor drop out from under her. The letter informed her that Change Healthcare, the company processing her medical claims, had suffered a data breach. Her name, her Social Security number, her diagnoses, her prescription history, her bank account information for direct deposits, all of it now sat in the hands of criminals. She called the number on the letter. She sat on hold for forty five minutes. When she finally reached a representative, the person on the other end offered her two years of free credit monitoring. Two years of watching to see if someone destroyed her financial life, in exchange for the permanent loss of her most personal medical information.

She was one of 192.7 million Americans affected by that single breach. Two out of every three people in this country. And here is the part that should make your blood boil. The hack

Chapter 21: Take Back Your Data and Privacy in Thirty Minutes 5,211 words

About The Author

Mitch is an award-winning trial lawyer, private mediator, legal tech advocate, author, and keynote speaker who has spent the last four decades fighting for justice, guiding clients through high-stakes cases, and breaking down complex issues for audiences everywhere. He has taken more than 70 jury trials to verdict, winning 97 percent of them, and has earned honors like California Litigation Lawyer of the Year and Orange County Trial Lawyer of the Year.

Since founding his firm in 1986, Mitch has helped individuals and businesses navigate catastrophic injury cases, business disputes, and mediation, earning his firm a spot in the Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers, a distinction given to fewer than five percent of law firms nationwide. He’s been recognized year after year as a Southern California Super Lawyer and holds the highest “AV” peer recognition for ethics and ability. He has also served the legal community as a Judge Pro Tem, mediator for the Orange County Superior Court, and f

About the Author 396 words

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Recommendations

Let me be real with you for a second.

What you're about to read are words that mean the world to me, kind words from past clients, friends, and leaders in my community. They've been generous enough to share them over the years, and I'm deeply grateful for every single one.

Now, these aren't specifically about this book. But here's why they matter.

They give you a window into the person behind these pages. And I think that's important, because when you're investing your time in someone's ideas, you deserve to know who you're dealing with.

Everything I do comes back to the people in my life — my family, my friends, my clients, the professionals I've had the privilege of working alongside, both offline and online. Those relationships aren't background noise. They're the foundation.

So before you dive in, know this: I don't take your time, your attention, or your trust lightly. I never have. And I never will.

_“Mitch is a strong legal and moral guide to t

Recommendations 4,880 words

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