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 never signed up for Conduent. You never agreed to their terms of service. Conduent collected your information because a government agency you trusted handed your information over.
The attackers spent nearly three months inside the system, from October 2024 through January 2025. They walked out with more than eight terabytes of stolen files containing names, home addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, health insurance details, and medical records. By February 2026, state filings confirmed more than 25 million victims, making this one of the largest thefts of personal data from a single company in American history.
The notification letters arrived this year. Cold, form letters from a company most recipients had never dealt with, offering credit monitoring and a phone number. No explanation for why a private company held the personal information of tens of millions of Americans with security so poor a criminal gang camped inside the system for months before anyone noticed.
How did we get to a point where 25 million Americans lose their most intimate data to a company they never chose, never contacted, and never knew existed? This book answers the question.
Why I Wrote This Book
My name is Mitch Jackson, and I have spent decades as a trial lawyer in California, representing people who had their rights violated. For most of my career, those violations happened in courtrooms, in contract disputes, in personal injury cases, and in corporate negligence claims. The legal system, for all its flaws, gave ordinary people a fighting chance to hold powerful institutions accountable.
Over the last several years, I have watched a new kind of violation take shape, one happening silently and constantly inside the devices you carry, the homes you live in, and the cars you drive. Clients now walk through my door dealing with stolen identities built from data broker profiles, fraudulent accounts opened with information purchased for pennies, reputations destroyed by AI generated deepfakes, and children whose digital footprints formed before they learned to walk.
I wrote this book because I am worried. I am worried about Americans who do not realize how much of their private lives companies have collected and sold. I am worried about my kids and grandkids growing up in a world where surveillance starts before they take their first steps. I am worried about a democracy where citizens lose the ability to think, search, move, or make personal decisions without generating a record someone else owns. And I know something most Americans do not: the legal protections you assume exist do not actually exist. The United States stands alone among major democracies as the only country without a strong federal privacy law. Americans have a patchwork. Some states offer real protections. Most do not.
What You Do Not Know Is Costing You
In 2025, the Identity Theft Resource Center recorded 3,322 data breaches in the United States, sending nearly 279 million victim notices to affected Americans. Eighty percent of Americans surveyed said they received at least one breach notification letter in the previous twelve months. Seventy percent of those letters did not even disclose how the breach happened, leaving recipients unable to assess their own risk.
Behind the breach headlines, data brokers maintain detailed profiles on more than 250 million American adults, containing your name, address, phone number, email, estimated income, political affiliation, religious identity, health conditions, and hundreds of additional data points. More than 750 data broker companies registered in California alone. You did not sign up for any of them. An investigation by CalMatters and The Markup found 35 data brokers intentionally hid their opt out pages from search results, making removal nearly impossible.
Think about an ordinary Tuesday. Your phone sent your location to advertisers and data aggregators. Your car logged your route, your speed, and whether you buckled your seatbelt. Your credit card purchase at a coffee shop joined a stream of transaction data flowing to marketing companies. Your search engine queries became data points in a profile tied to your device. Your smart speaker sent audio to a cloud server. Your television logged every program on your screen. Your health app stored a symptom search in a database no health privacy law governs. If someone followed you around all day writing down every place you went, every purchase you made, and every question you typed, you would call the police. The digital version of this surveillance happens every day, and the companies doing the tracking already have a device in your pocket sending the information for them.
The AI Accelerant
Artificial intelligence has made every dimension of this crisis faster and more dangerous. Voice cloning now creates a near perfect replica of any person's voice for less than five dollars and a few seconds of audio. Parents have received calls from what sounded exactly like their children begging for money. Cloned voices have fooled bank representatives during verification checks. The FTC reported Americans lost 12.5 billion dollars to consumer fraud in 2024, a 25 percent increase over the prior year, with AI powered scams growing fast. Romance bots running entirely on artificial intelligence now conduct long term relationships with victims, building emotional bonds over weeks before requesting money, operating around the clock in multiple languages at a scale no human scammer has ever achieved.
Researchers at Stanford found all six major AI companies train their models on user conversations by default. When you describe a medical condition or a family conflict or a legal problem to a chatbot, the conversation becomes training data. The models themselves learned by scraping billions of web pages, pulling in personal photos, resumes, blog posts, and financial records belonging to people who never consented. Deleting your data from a trained model is technically impossible. Millions of records containing personally identifiable information sit inside AI training sets, and American citizens have no clear legal path to removal.
Your Body, Your Health, Your DNA, Your Children
Facial recognition systems now operate in airports, stadiums, retail stores, and public streets. TSA installed facial recognition at more than 80 airports. Clearview AI scraped billions of social media photos for a law enforcement database. Unlike a password or credit card number, you do not get to request a new face. A breach of biometric data lasts forever. Illinois passed the Biometric Information Privacy Act. Most states have no similar law.
Most Americans assume HIPAA protects all health related information. HIPAA does not. The fitness tracker on your wrist, the symptom checker on your phone, the wellness app tracking your sleep and exercise fall entirely outside the law. Reproductive health data has become uniquely dangerous in post Dobbs America, where period tracking apps and location visits to reproductive health clinics generate potential evidence in states where abortion carries criminal penalties. A federal court in June 2025 struck down a rule protecting reproductive health records under HIPAA, and the administration chose not to appeal.
When 23andMe filed for bankruptcy, the genetic data of approximately 15 million customers entered a legal limbo no privacy law addresses. Your DNA does not expire, does not change, and does not belong to you alone. The information reveals details about your parents, your siblings, your children, and generations not yet born. State attorneys general issued urgent alerts urging users to delete their data before a sale transferred ownership to an unknown buyer.
Children face surveillance from their earliest digital moments. Games, apps, educational platforms, and school systems harvest data on children long before those children understand what data means. The FTC brought enforcement actions against education technology companies storing records on more than ten million students. Age verification systems create new privacy problems by requiring biometric data to prove age. The tools marketed to protect children expose children to entirely new forms of data collection.
The System Built to Fail You
The absence of a federal privacy law is not an oversight. Powerful industries have spent decades lobbying Congress to keep privacy legislation from reaching the finish line. Cookie banners are engineered to exhaust you into clicking Accept All. Privacy policies average more than 7,000 words. The FTC has documented opt out buttons placed on websites knowing those buttons did not function. California has brought enforcement actions against businesses ignoring Global Privacy Control signals. The entire architecture of digital consent exists to ensure you agree without understanding what you are agreeing to.
Behind consent theater, companies use your browsing history and location and income estimates to charge you different prices for the same products. Tenant screening companies compile reports determining whether you get an apartment. Background check firms generate dossiers influencing whether you get a job. Errors are common. Most people never learn these reports exist until a decision has already gone against them. And federal agencies including ICE, the FBI, and the DEA routinely purchase location and behavioral data from commercial brokers, bypassing the Fourth Amendment entirely. The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act passed the House and died in the Senate. And someone is still tracking you.
What This Book Will Give You
This book takes you from understanding to action. The early chapters reveal the structural failures making everything else possible. The middle chapters walk you through biometric surveillance, government surveillance, deepfake technology, AI powered fraud, chatbot data collection, the collapse of health data protections, reproductive privacy dangers, the genetic privacy crisis, and the surveillance tracking your children. The later chapters expose phone number hijacking, data breaches, government data purchases, algorithmic pricing discrimination, and consent theater. Each chapter includes real stories. Each chapter explains the mechanism. Each chapter tells you what the law protects and what the law leaves exposed. Each chapter ends with concrete steps you take right now. The final chapter gives you a thirty minute privacy action plan for you and your family.
I did not write this book for privacy professionals, Silicon Valley engineers or politicians. I wrote this book for the parent checking their kid's phone at the dinner table, for the grandmother who got a call from someone who sounded exactly like her grandson asking for money, for every American who has ever clicked Agree without reading what they agreed to, which is all of us.
I have spent my career fighting for people who were told to read the fine print, to accept the terms, to trust the process. The process is broken. The fine print is a trap. You deserve to know what is happening to your information. You deserve to understand who profits from the collection and sale of your personal life. You deserve a guide who will tell you the truth in plain language, without hedging and without pretending the situation is less urgent than the situation truly is.
The companies profiting from your data are counting on you to stay confused, to stay overwhelmed, to stay passive. Every chapter you are about to read replaces confusion with clarity. Every action step replaces passivity with power.
You did not agree to be the product. You do not have to remain the product. Start reading. Start fighting back. Your privacy is worth the fight, and so are you.