The FRIDAY App, a New Day for Data Privacy
“The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness…They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” — Louis D. Brandeis
We believe that your personal data — where you go, what you do, who you like and how you feel — is part of you. You should own it. And you can’t enjoy the freedoms you deserve if companies (and governments) know more about you than you do. That is why we are thrilled to announce the launch of our first product, the FRIDAY app, aimed at increasing your personal freedom.
FRIDAY is a free easy-to-use app that extracts your Mobile Ad ID for you, and notifies the companies that sell your location history to stop. Then we report back to you with the responses. It sounds simple, but the data industry has intentionally created layers of unnecessary complexity to obfuscate their true plans. This post will get into why location surveillance is so complex, but first let us introduce ourselves.
FRIDAY is a company committed to your personal freedom. It’s in our name — Friday is the best day of the week, the day when you can finally be yourself. But freedom and privacy go hand-in-hand. It’s no accident that every despotic government surveils its population. Information is power, and the only way for you to enjoy freedom of identity, expression and action is if you control who knows what. If someone else surveils you, they have power over you. That’s power they don’t deserve.
We know, from years of experience in the data business, how money is made off your data. And it turns out, with the right tools, products and services, you could control all your data and earn your fair share of the $69.2B personal data business. The data industry has made owning your data difficult and time consuming — and for FRIDAY it will be — but for consumers we are committed to making it easy. The industries that require your data to provide free services, and the industries that make you pay for protection, are two sides of the same coin. Our software team has already reached a breakthrough development that lets you easily retrieve, control and profit from your data, leveraging web3. As soon as it’s ready, we’ll let you know.
But first things first. You can’t own your data if someone else already does. We have to clean up the mess this industry has made before we move on to the brighter future. And of all the sketchy businesses that sell your information without your permission, location data brokers are the worst. So that’s where we started.
Data brokers are companies that buy and sell your information, but with whom you have no relationship. The recent Supreme Court ruling on Dobbs has shined a light on the darkest corner of the shadowy world of surveillance — location data brokers. For a mere $160, any willing buyer can go to these brokers and purchase a week’s worth of data on where people who visited Planned Parenthood came from, and where they went afterwards. This is incredibly troubling, and the implications strike at the core of our most sacred rights as Americans (freedom of religion, speech, assembly, etc.)
The key to location data brokers’ power lies in your Mobile Ad ID, which is used to track your location, and it’s hidden on your phone. You can’t find it anywhere in your settings or your profile. Only an app can retrieve it. Which means even if you wanted to exercise your privacy rights, you couldn’t. Location data brokers use that Mobile Ad ID to sell your location history. And people bring their phones with them everywhere (think about it — everywhere). Do you want a company selling the trace of everywhere you’ve been to strangers, without your permission? Shouldn’t that be illegal?
Yes, it should. But until that happens, we’ve launched this app. In a few clicks, It retrieves your Mobile Ad ID with your permission and then notifies our growing list of location data brokers that they must stop selling that Mobile Ad ID. They are required by law to reply, and we summarize those results in our app for you. We also report back to the relevant regulatory agencies about who’s complied and who hasn’t. This feature is free and always will be — because it shouldn’t have to exist in the first place.
Eventually we will launch our empowering set of services, designed to help you profit from all the data you’ve shared over the years. And if you choose to profit from your data, then we’ll charge a small fee. But everyone deserves privacy, dignity, and freedom. Let’s start with that.
Please download the app and start exercising your right to be free.
