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 from you.
Data brokers are companies whose entire business model 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 is packaged and available for purchase. And federal agencies have been buying it for years - routing around the Constitution's warrant requirement by simply swiping a credit card instead of going through 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
This 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 previously 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 these three things:
Making 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.
Creating 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.
Maintaining population coverage databases: any database holding detailed personal information of the size of a population with psychological and operational profiles must delete that data entirely. The bill treats these databases 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 about what you don’t need to worry about.
Your favorite apps would still absolutely 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 on apps like these, not the services you actually use.
Search engines would still show you relevant ads and content. 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 completely exempt from burden. This is make things easy on local businesses with under $40 million in revenue and fewer than 200,000 customers, they simply aren’t affected by the population coverage data prohibition. They can still keep their datasets in order to keep maintain their newsletters, conduct marketing, etc., while larger companies will need oversight.
What the bill does target is the shadow economy that most people don't even know exists: which is 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 shiny 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 by itself. 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 through loopholes. It’s time to close them.
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. It forces 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.
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