Delete The Surveillance State
Every American with a phone is in somebody's database right now. If we pass the MAD Act, then you are no longer for sale.
Right now, the federal government doesn't need a warrant to know where you've been, who you talk to, what you believe, or what you do every day. It just buys that information from companies that already collected it.
Data brokers are companies whose entire business is harvesting and selling your personal information. They have assembled databases covering hundreds of millions of Americans. Your location history, your browsing habits, your political leanings, your religious practices, your relationships, your daily routines. All of it packaged and available for purchase. And federal agencies have been buying it for years, getting around the Constitution's warrant requirement by simply swiping a credit card instead of going to a judge.
The Supreme Court ruled in Carpenter v. United States (2018) that the government can't use legal loopholes to dodge the Fourth Amendment's protections on your personal data. But nobody passed a law to enforce that ruling. So the buying continued.
The MAD Act would end it.
What It Would Ban
The bill draws a clear line. The government would be prohibited from purchasing, licensing, or accessing your personal data from commercial sources - period. No federal agency, no state or local government, no contractor acting as a middleman. If the government wants your data, it would have to do what the Constitution always required: get a warrant from a judge.
But the bill goes further than just cutting off the government's credit card. It would dismantle the infrastructure that makes mass surveillance possible in the first place. Specifically, it would ban three things:
Psychological profiles: any model that assesses your personality, emotional vulnerabilities, political beliefs, or susceptibility to persuasion. These are the tools that were used in the Cambridge Analytica scandal to manipulate voters without their knowledge. The ban is absolute. No commercial purpose, no national security justification, and no fine-print "consent" makes them legal.
Operational profiles: comprehensive records of your locations, routines, relationships, and daily patterns pulled together from multiple unrelated sources. The kind of dossier that lets someone know where you are, when you're there, and who you're with. These are targeting packages, and the bill would make assembling them illegal.
Population coverage databases: any database holding detailed personal information on more than ten million Americans. The bill treats these as surveillance infrastructure, regardless of what they're supposedly for. Companies that currently hold them would have 135 days to destroy them, verified by independent auditors who certify, under penalty of perjury, that the data is gone.
What It Would NOT Touch
This is the part people worry about, so let's be direct.
Your apps would still work. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Spotify - none of them need a psychological profile of you to function. The bill targets the hidden layer of data exploitation happening behind the scenes, not the services you actually use.
Search engines would still show you relevant ads. If you search for "running shoes," you'd still see ads for running shoes. The bill explicitly protects contextual advertising (ads based on what you're looking at right now ) because that doesn't require building a permanent file on you. It just requires reading the page you're on.
Online shopping would still work normally. A store you buy from can still use your purchase history to recommend products. That's a direct relationship between you and the business. The bill's safe harbor protects first-party data - information a company collects from its own customers for its own services.
Small businesses are exempt from any burden. A local business with under $40 million in revenue and fewer than 200,000 customers isn't affected by this bill.
What the bill does target is the shadow economy that most people don't even know exists: the network of data brokers, ad-tech middlemen, and targeting contractors that collect your information from dozens of unrelated sources, stitch it together into a detailed profile of your life, and sell it to anyone willing to pay, including your own government.
Why This Matters
The problem isn't that a store knows you bought a pair of shoes. The problem is that a data broker can combine your group chat activity with your location at a community organizing meeting, your donations to an advocacy nonprofit, and your social connections to other activists to map out your entire network: who you work with, where you meet, and what you're planning. And then sell that map to a government agency that couldn't legally collect that information on its own. That's not hypothetical. It's exactly what the FBI did to civil rights organizers during COINTELPRO…except now, instead of planting informants, the government can just buy the blueprint of your movement off a shelf.
That's not advertising. That's surveillance. And right now, it's perfectly legal.
The MAD Act wouldn't break the internet, kill targeted ads, or stop your favorite apps from working. It would break the pipeline that turns your everyday digital life into a government surveillance tool and force the government to go back to doing what the Fourth Amendment always required: showing up before a judge with probable cause before it gets to look into your private life.
A note to readers: We are committed to providing the public with accurate, factually grounded information. If you identify any errors of fact, gaps in sourcing, or flaws in the reasoning presented in this article, we would be grateful if you would bring them to our attention so they can be corrected. Mistakes are possible in any work of this kind, and we take corrections seriously.
