Big Tech knows your plans. So what?

Nobody opens Facebook to shop for a toaster. Then you linger on a photo of a bagel, a buddy buys one, and for a week your feed is a toaster showroom, lifehack reels and all. You didn’t go looking for toasters, but boy oh boy did they come looking for you.

That’s the deal most free apps run on: learn what moves you, then sell access to it. On a good day you end up with a very nice toaster.

The same machinery sells other things. In 2018 we learned that Cambridge Analytica had pulled data on as many as 87 million Facebook users and used it to aim political ads, some to change minds and, by later reporting, some to keep certain voters home. The FTC fined Facebook a record $5 billion over its privacy failures. When Facebook told investors the fine was coming, its stock went up.

Speaking of Meta, which owns Facebook: WhatsApp deserves real credit. Your messages are end-to-end encrypted, meaning they’re scrambled on your phone and unscrambled only on the phones you sent them to. Not even Mark Zuckerberg can read them. Your group’s 400 messages about brunch are safe from everyone, including most of the group, who muted it months ago.

But encryption locks the letter, not the envelope. WhatsApp can still see who you talk to, when, how often, from which phone and roughly where. That outside layer is called metadata, and it tells a story all on its own.

Michael Hayden, who ran both the NSA and the CIA, put it bluntly in a 2014 debate:

He meant counterterrorism, not brunch, but the point travels: nobody needs to read your messages to learn a lot about your life. Who you text at 1 in the morning does most of the work. “It’s encrypted” and “they don’t know anything about me” are different sentences.

An event app is almost all envelope. What was said at book club matters less to anyone else than who showed up, where and when. And it happens again next month.

Take one ordinary invite and read it the way someone who buys data for a living would.

This has already happened to people who trusted an app with exactly this. In December 2021, The Markup reported that Life360, an app families use to see where everyone is, had been selling the precise locations of its users, kids included, to about a dozen data brokers. A month later Life360 said it would stop, with one exception: it kept selling precise locations to Arity, a company owned by the insurer Allstate. Families signed up to keep each other safe, and their whereabouts became a product. Its CEO told The Markup the sales were disclosed “in the fine print of its privacy policy.” One user put it more simply: “I had no idea it would be passed around this way.”

Because the deal changes. In 2012, WhatsApp published a blog post called “Why we don’t sell ads.” Its cofounder Jan Koum kept a note from his partner, Brian Acton, taped to his desk: “No ads! No games! No gimmicks!” Two years later Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion. In 2016, WhatsApp began sharing users’ phone numbers with Facebook, and in 2017 European regulators fined Facebook €110 million for having told them, during the purchase, that it couldn’t reliably link the two services’ accounts. In June 2025, ads arrived in WhatsApp’s Updates tab, aimed using your city, your language and whatever Meta knows from any accounts you’ve linked.

The founders meant what they wrote in 2012. Brian Acton, who wrote that note, left Facebook in 2017 over how it wanted to make money from WhatsApp, and walked away from $850 million to do it. A year later he told Forbes:

That’s the trouble in 2026. Most apps are good, and most of the people running them mean what they say today. The deal can still change under you, and you can’t see inside to check. What you can check is what they’ve promised in writing, and whether they keep it.

Fair question, and a scale check first. Joinue is one person with a day job, not WhatsApp, and nobody is offering me $850 million for anything. But small doesn’t mean harmless. I run an app for making plans, so I’m sitting on exactly this kind of information.

I’ve also seen this from the sales side. Before Joinue, I spent years selling social media analytics, software that let brands sift through millions of public posts to see what people thought of them. I don’t think it was wrong, since everything it read was public. But with a few keywords I could pull up a stranger’s post about a brand in seconds, and that stranger almost certainly had no idea tools like that existed. That gap, between what people share and what they think happens to it, is a big part of why Joinue works the way it does.

Here’s what anyone holding event app data could do with it:

• Sell a list of everyone who’s out every Thursday night to an insurer curious about your “lifestyle.”
• Tell a political campaign which neighborhoods go to which kinds of events, so it knows whom to fire up and whom to quietly discourage.
• Know which houses sit empty on Saturday night, because everyone RSVP’d to something across town.
• Notice that two people who always came together suddenly stopped, and sell “probably newly single” to a dating app.

Versions of these already happen. You just read about Life360. Data brokers buy and sell the location of people’s phones, and campaigns buy voter profiles built from shopping and browsing habits. It’s usually all spelled out in a privacy policy nobody reads.

I don’t do any of it. I won’t sell your personal information, sell anything to political campaigns, or build a feed designed to keep you staring at your phone until 2 a.m. You’ve heard promises like that before, so here’s why this one is worth more than my word:

• It’s in writing, where it counts.

  My promises not to sell your personal data, hand it to data brokers or let political campaigns use it are in Joinue’s privacy policy, a legal document, and the FTC goes after companies that break their own. The terms do the same for your photos: a short list of uses, never in ads without asking you first, and no use at all once you delete them. A policy can be rewritten, mine included, but not quietly. You’d be told, which is the next point.

• The protections are built in, not switched on.

  The rules about who sees what live in the database itself. Loosening them would take deliberate work, not a quiet change to a setting.

• You hear about changes from me.

  If Joinue changes how it handles your data in a way that matters, you’ll be told in the app or by email.

• It doesn’t depend on who pays for Joinue.

  Today that’s me. Anyone who invests hears up front that these lines don’t move, because they’re in the privacy policy and built into the database. And if I’m ever pushed to run Joinue against them, I’ll walk away before I do it.

One part of my deal you might not love: Joinue’s privacy policy leaves room to sell trends someday. A trend describes a neighborhood on a Wednesday night, never a person. Anonymous data can sometimes be traced back to people, so the policy also rules out any figure drawn from so few people that it could point to someone, and bars anyone who gets one from trying. If it ever gets close to happening, I’d like to put the idea to the people who use Joinue first, probably as a poll. I’d rather tell you now than have you find it in the fine print.

You can’t inspect my database any more than anyone else’s, so you still shouldn’t take my word for it. What you can do is hold me to what’s written here and in the policy. That’s why it’s written down, and it’s what the five questions at the end are for.

Right now, I do. Joinue doesn’t cost much to run at its current size, and I have a good day job, so I cover the servers, the maps and the email myself. It makes no money today, though you can donate if you’d like to help.

That stops working if Joinue gets much bigger. More people means bigger bills, and eventually it has to pay its own way. This is how I’d like it to:

These aren’t promises. They’re in the app today.

More details are in Your data, your call and the privacy policy.

Including mine, so my answers are under each one.

1. 1

   How does it make money?

   If you can’t tell, there’s a decent chance the answer is you.

   Joinue: It doesn’t yet. I pay for it, and the plan is in “Who pays for Joinue” above.

2. 2

   Who else can see my stuff?

   Other users, advertisers, “trusted partners.” It’s always the trusted partners.

   Joinue: The people you share it with. The services that run the app, like hosting, maps, email and a moderation service that checks public posts, handle parts of it, and the privacy policy names each one. No advertisers.

3. 3

   Does it strip the location from my photos?

   Joinue: Yes, before they’re stored.

4. 4

   If I delete my account, what actually happens?

   Joinue: Your account and your private data go, apart from the short list in the privacy policy.

5. 5

   Is it trying to get me out the door, or keep me scrolling?

   Joinue: Out the door. There’s no endless scroll.

If an app can’t answer these plainly, that’s an answer.

Post the photos. Go to the thing. Invite the friend who always says maybe. Just know who’s holding your guest list, pick apps that will tell you what they plan to do with it, and notice if that ever changes.

And if your feed fills up with toasters, now you know why.