Privacy is the Fortress of Power
Data is the operating system of global power. Control it, and you shape the world; lose it, and the world shapes you.
By Mike Yeagley
Unplugged Board of Advisors
& Chief Strategy Officer, cohort.ID
Every modern threat—military, economic, informational—runs on data. The same telemetry that helps brands predict what you’ll buy enables adversaries to predict how nations behave.
Adversaries—chief among them China—have run this play for years. Beijing weaponized the data economy, fencing its own flows while siphoning others through commercial channels.
This isn’t classical espionage. No hacks or dead drops—just lawful purchase at industrial scale.
Ad networks, real-time bidding, and broker exchanges turn innocuous telemetry—location pings, app events, browsing context—into longitudinal dossiers of behavior.
The scale is staggering. Ad networks interrogate your device roughly 747 times a day—what you read, where you go, what you search, who you’re near. Google’s vendor list alone includes 2,000+ third parties touching U.S. data. Most you’ve never heard of; some are based in China.
A decade ago, I exposed that cheat code: advertising infrastructure as a perfect collection platform. It’s not a glitch; it’s a business model that models psychology, predicts decisions, and lets foreign powers shape both.
The Underestimated Vulnerability
Adversarial targeting rides the same rails as digital advertising. The stack is a global telemetry network with a shared workflow: collect signals, stitch identities, segment cohorts, test, optimize, scale. Marketers sell products; adversaries seed dissent.
- Shopping trail. Purchases/pageviews tagged into lifestyle profiles that help identify and influence local leaders.
- Health signals. Searches, clinic visits, and mood-app use are segmented and tied to device IDs, becoming dossiers of vulnerability.
- Network mapping. Call/text metadata and co-location reveal clusters—churches, activists, civic groups—for tailored injection.
- Life events. Funeral planning, newborn supplies, and job-loss queries signal disruption; timed messaging exploits the moment.
- Affiliation & identity. Attendance, interests, and ticketing are stitched with location/purchases to expose influence networks.
- Cohorts for influence. Lookalikes built across demographics; polarizing narratives tested and scaled to divide.
Adversarial interference doesn’t need to hack, intercept, or steal; it uses the data we volunteer as the scaffolding to deliver social chaos. Data markets are battlefields, algorithms the weapons, civilians the targets.
Beijing Built Rules to Win
The Great Firewall serves as the perimeter for the Data Security Law and the Personal Information Protection Law. Reciprocity is absent: U.S. data flows out; China’s does not flow in. Ad networks function as a lawful one-way mirror—easy for Chinese entities to buy and stitch U.S. signals, hard for the U.S. to demand symmetry.
The National Intelligence Law compels any Chinese entity to support state intelligence. When Chinese firms receive data via U.S. ad exchanges, there’s no meaningful barrier between commercial streams and state access. This is commercially acquired intelligence at a national scale. The West built the pipes; Beijing turned them.
Washington, by contrast, treats privacy as a consumer issue. We reward frictionless flows, then ask beneficiaries to police themselves. Even the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act mostly trims the edges—it restricts some broker transfers while leaving vast amounts of metadata and intermediary workarounds.
Washington isn’t protecting you. Statutes aren’t firewalls.
Agency Starts at the Handset
That reality shifts the burden to Americans—and that’s how it should be. Agency belongs to citizens, not bureaucracies.
Choose discretion over extraction: use hardware with privacy baked in from the silicon up, SIMs that sever persistent identifiers, and “de-Google” your exhaust. Assume metadata outlives content.
Privacy is a discipline. “Nothing to hide” assumes you know who’s looking and why. You don’t hide a house key because you’re guilty; you hide it because keys grant access. .Data is the master key. Privacy doesn’t conceal your life—it prevents unauthorized control over it.
Choosing privacy-first hardware is a civic duty just shy of voting. It stops your data from
becoming geopolitical fuel. At scale, it changes the economics of surveillance.
The Discipline of a Free Nation
Washington warned that “habitual hatred or fondness” for other nations distorts judgment. His concern was sovereignty: a free people must deliberate without coercion. Then, it meant avoiding entanglements. Now, it means protecting the private sphere from digital interference.
The threat bleeds through devices, platforms, and the commerce of data. When foreign actors can model behavior, predict intent, and shape discourse, influence replaces consent.
Privacy is not isolation; it is the architecture of freedom. It restores the ability to act and decide without unseen manipulation—the way a republic preserves agency in a networked world. Self-government now requires self-control over data and signals.
Privacy’s discipline isn’t nostalgia; it’s liberty’s logic for the digital era.
Privacy is not retreat; it is how free people remain sovereign.
If power flows through data, liberty must flow through privacy.
Make privacy your fortress. Hold the line.