Make Orwell fiction again
Big Brother is real. He just does not look like the poster. There is no single telescreen watching you. There is a market. You are the product being logged, bought and resold. 1984 was supposed to be a warning. At this point it reads more like a product roadmap. Make Orwell fiction again.
The government does not need to spy on you. It can buy you.
The cleanest way into your life is not a wiretap. It is a receipt. A whole industry of data brokers collects location pings from the apps on your phone and sells them. Your weather app, your game, that free flashlight, all of them can leak a stream of coordinates tied to an advertising ID.
Venntel, a subsidiary of Gravy Analytics, has sold raw phone location data to ICE, Customs and Border Protection and the FBI. Babel Street runs a tool called Locate X whose buyers include US Special Operations Command, CBP, ICE and the Secret Service. Fog Data Science sells a service called Fog Reveal to local police, which lets them look up where a phone has been through a website.
Here is the part that should bother you. Location data that would need a warrant if the police asked your carrier for it can often be bought from a broker with no warrant at all. That gap has a name. The data broker loophole is how a lot of agencies skip the Fourth Amendment without technically breaking it. Babel Street even tells clients not to use Locate X data as evidence or mention it in court, which tells you what the company thinks of its own legal footing.
The wiretap got a legal upgrade
In April 2024 Congress renewed Section 702 of FISA, the law behind a lot of warrantless mass surveillance. Then it made the law worse. The bill was named the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, which is funny, because it reformed almost nothing. It stretched the definition of who counts as an “electronic communication service provider” so far that, as EFF pointed out, it could rope in ordinary businesses, even landlords, into helping the government tap communications. The program was sold as a tool aimed at foreigners abroad. It keeps sweeping up Americans. The 2024 renewal widened the net instead of tightening it.
Your face is already in the lineup
Clearview AI scraped more than 50 billion photos from social media and the open web, turned them into faceprints and sold search access to police. Upload a photo, get back where else that face shows up online. Nobody in that database agreed to be in it. European regulators have fined the company more than 100 million euros in total. In the US the ACLU forced a settlement in Illinois that bars Clearview from selling its faceprints to most private companies. The fines have not stopped it. The photos are already scraped.
So what actually works
None of this is hopeless. You cannot opt out of being a target. But you can make yourself expensive to track. Most of the surveillance above runs on cheap bulk data, so raising your own cost is the whole game.
Start with a threat model before you install anything. EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense walks you through the only questions that matter: what do you want to protect, who do you want to keep it from and how much effort is it worth. A journalist protecting a source and someone dodging ad tracking need different setups. Skip this step and you will spend effort on the wrong things.
Then the basics, which cover most people most of the time.
Move your messaging to Signal. It encrypts the content of your calls and texts end to end, so the company itself cannot read them. Signal also keeps almost no metadata, which is more than you can say for SMS or most chat apps.
Kill your phone’s advertising ID. That single number is what ties those location pings back to you across apps. On Android you can delete it outright under Settings, Privacy, Ads. On iOS turn off “Allow Apps to Request to Track.” This one setting starves a good chunk of the data broker pipeline.
In your browser, run uBlock Origin or EFF’s Privacy Badger to block trackers. Turn on Global Privacy Control, which sends a legally binding do-not-sell signal in states like California.
For anonymity rather than plain privacy, use the Tor Browser. It hides which sites you visit from your network and hides your address from the sites. It is slower and it is easy to misconfigure, so read the docs before you lean on it for anything serious.
If you want to go further, opt out of the data brokers directly. There is no single switch. You file with each broker one by one. Your data creeps back every few months, so treat it as maintenance rather than a one-time fix. On the device side, GrapheneOS turns a Pixel into a hardened de-Googled phone, which is a real jump in effort and a real jump in protection.
Cameras are the hard part
Everything above raises your cost online. Cameras are harder, because the collection happens in public space where you have almost no say. A Flock reader on a pole, a CCTV camera on a storefront, a face-recognition system at an event: none of them ask permission. Covering your own plate is illegal in most places anyway. So the honest advice here is narrower than the marketing on any anti-surveillance gadget.
The first move is the same as with Flock. Know where the cameras are and push on policy. DeFlock maps license plate readers. EFF’s Street-Level Surveillance project tracks what departments run and how. You cannot dodge a camera you cannot see. You also cannot argue a system out of your town if nobody knows it is there.
Face recognition runs on photos of your face, so starve it. Clearview built its database by scraping public social media, which means every public, tagged photo of you is training data for the next lineup. Lock your accounts down, untag where you can and stop posting a clean front-facing headshot to the open web. This will not erase what is already scraped. It just slows what gets added.
At a protest or any sensitive gathering, the camera is not your biggest problem. Your phone is. It broadcasts a location and a device identity that ties you to the crowd. Cell-site simulators can grab that in bulk. EFF’s guide to attending a protest is the one to read: put the phone in airplane mode or leave it at home, use Signal, cover identifying features and dress without logos or unique gear. A mask lowers face-recognition accuracy, though modern systems increasingly work around partial coverage, so treat it as friction rather than a cloak.
Be skeptical of anti-surveillance fashion. Camera-dazzle makeup and patterned clothing made headlines. Against current recognition models most of it is unreliable. You will also draw more human attention wearing it than a camera would ever give you. The dull methods, seeing the cameras, shrinking your online face and controlling your phone, do more than any gadget.
And do the boring civic thing. Most of this is legal either because a law allows it or because no law forbids it yet. Flock cameras came out of some towns because residents showed up to meetings. The data broker loophole closes with legislation, not with a browser extension. Harden your own devices first, then go make Orwell fiction again at the policy level.