Cases: extraction on the record¶

What makes a case here is not that a law was broken to gather the data. Usually none was. It is that the ordinary, permitted trade produced an outcome no one had agreed to: an orientation disclosed, a menstrual cycle handed to advertisers, a browsing history sold by a privacy tool, a religion read off a person’s likes, a location switch that turned nothing off. The regulators run from Oslo and Paris to Seoul and Canberra, which is a fair sign the pattern is not a local one. Each case is cited to its primary source, a regulator’s decision or a newsroom’s investigation.

The government-purchase version of the same trade, commercial location data reused to track EU and NATO officials, is documented in the surveillance model’s Databroker Files case.

Last reviewed: 2026-07-16.