THE DÆTRAX DISPATCH.

No. 29 · The Status Quo

It asked you everything. It answers nothing.

We read the privacy policies of the most popular video-interview and assessment platforms, then the sales pages of the same companies. Half the policies never mention AI. The sales pages sell it by name. In between sits everything a candidate is owed and not told: how long the recording stays, where the score goes, and what happens when the software gets it wrong.

No. 28 · On Notice

Your request enters their books

Companies keep what you give them for years, and held on its own that fact reads as a reason to do nothing. Read their own regulators' instructions and it inverts: the same book-keeping that holds your data is expected to receive your request, route it to a named owner, log it, and answer it on a deadline. In one country, destroying data to dodge a request is a crime. And the stop request, once it lands, is in force for good: you send it once, and you never owe a follow-up.

No. 27 · The Backstop

Forty-two thousand complaints. Two fines.

The UK regulator's own annual report, read as a pipeline: 42,315 data protection complaints went in, 43 investigations and two fines came out, and seven complaints in ten were not answered within the regulator's own service window. This is the machine people mean when they say 'report them to the ICO', and its shape repeats from California to Ireland to Australia. It is why the reply in your inbox is worth more than the complaint you could file.

No. 26 · The Status Quo

Thirteen million refusals, and not one reply

One publisher's own annual disclosure: 13,426,237 opt-out signals in a year, against 842 deletion requests and 113 access requests. The opt-out is now the most-sent privacy request in the world by a factor of thousands, and it is the only one that never gets an answer. That is what makes it scale. It is also what makes it impossible to check.

No. 25 · The Status Quo

Nobody can ask on your behalf

Researchers filed hundreds of privacy requests for real people, as their appointed agent, with the law behind them. Most were ignored. One company asked the agent for its mother's maiden name. The refusal is not a glitch, it is the shape of the thing, and it decides who can actually ask.

No. 24 · Recruitment

The interview before the interview

You need the job. They know it. So before anyone interviews you, the process starts collecting: your ID over email, a screening call that is recorded, an exercise scored by software you never see. Job seeking has become one of the heaviest data handovers in ordinary life, placed exactly where saying no costs the most.

No. 23 · The Status Quo

The you that isn't you

Somewhere out there is a portrait of you built from everything except your name: a device, a postcode, an age band, habits, movements, purchases. It prices you, ranks you and follows you, and it was never designed to be deletable. Why that profile exists for almost everyone, why nobody alive can audit it, and why the only thing you control is how well fed it is.

No. 22 · The Status Quo

What happens when you outsource your data requests

Deletion services sell a clean exit: pay monthly, they write to the brokers, you fade off the lists. Researchers just ran that job by hand across every broker on California's registry. Most never answered. Some confirmed deleting people who do not exist. And the products holding your most sensitive data never receive a request at all.

No. 21 · The Status Quo

What the privacy switches actually switch off

Every app now hands you switches: ad personalisation, do not sell, off-platform activity, AI training. They are on by default, they only work forward, and they do not reach what already left the building. Flip every one you can find. Then remember what a switch cannot do: put anything on the record.

No. 20 · Dating & Matrimony

They kept every version of you

Deleting the app never deleted the account, and coming back builds a new one on top of the old. Cycle a few times, the way almost everyone does, and you are not one user who took breaks. You are five profiles, five clocks, and now five scans of your face.

No. 19 · The Status Quo

The deletion trap

You tap delete, the screen says gone, and you believe it. That confirmation is the trap. The law lets a company keep the part that matters, named and whole, to defend itself, and the request that actually works is not the one on the button.

No. 18 · The Status Quo

The brand deal's fine print wants your likeness

A brand deal pays for a video. The contract, or just the platform's terms behind it, can quietly license something worth far more than the fee: your likeness, to reuse, to hand on, and increasingly to train into AI. It is not only creators who sign this. Anyone who uploads a face has agreed to a version of it.

No. 17 · The Status Quo

When they say 'anonymised,' keep the receipt

Ask a company to delete your data and you might be told it was anonymised instead. The word sounds final. In law it is a high bar that much anonymised data never clears, and one that keeps rising. Worth understanding before you accept it, and worth keeping in writing.

No. 16 · Marriage

What matrimony apps collect that dating apps don't

It asks your full name, your income, your family, what you are really looking for and a verified photo of your face, then keeps the file. A marriage profile is the most complete, most honest record most people ever build, and some of the biggest apps hand it to advertisers and brokers in plain sight. Here is why it is the most dangerous one you will ever fill in.

No. 15 · The Status Quo

How freebies, quizzes and giveaways collect you

Your feed is full of funnels that do not look like data collection: the free guide for your email, the quiz, the giveaway, the newsletter, the follow. Each one gets you to self-identify, bolting who you are to what you want, and pours it into the same machine that auctions you. Here is how the harvest is disguised, and the part of it you can still act on.

No. 14 · The Status Quo

The accounts you forgot are still collecting

You have around a hundred online accounts and could name a fraction of them. The ones you forgot did not go quiet. They still hold your data, still feed it onward, and they are the first to leak, because nobody is watching them, you least of all. Unlike the copies already gone, this is the exposure you can still reach and close.

No. 13 · The Status Quo

Deleting the account doesn't delete the copies

Pressing delete feels like an ending. It is a local event in one system, while copies of you carry on in backups, partners, brokers, other countries, and inside AI models that cannot give them back. Here is why total deletion is a fiction, and what is actually worth doing instead.

No. 12 · Ad Tech & Data Brokers

You are auctioned hundreds of times a day

Every time a page loads, what you are doing and roughly where you are gets broadcast to a crowd of companies you have never heard of, so they can bid to put an ad in front of you. Hundreds of times a day. Here is the machine that compiles and sells you, and the part of it you can still reach.

No. 11 · Identity Verification

You handed your face to a company you never chose

To watch a video, read a forum, or open an app you now upload your ID or scan your face for a verification company you did not pick and cannot see. Here is what they keep, why 'we delete it' is rarely the whole story, and why 'anonymous' already failed in front of a regulator.

No. 10 · Mental Health & Therapy

What you told your therapy app, and who else got it

Depression, medication, whether you have ever felt suicidal. You typed it into an intake form that promised to keep it private. Here is where that data actually goes, who it is shared with, and what survives the day you stop.

No. 09 · DNA & Genetic

Your genome is a bankruptcy asset

You spit in a tube out of curiosity. You handed over the one identifier you can never change, a version of it for every relative you have, to a company that can be breached, and sold.

No. 08 · AI Tools

What AI chatbots keep from your conversations

The most honest writing most people do all day goes into a chatbot. That text trains the model, gets read by people, and survives the delete button. A court has already proved the last part.

No. 07 · The Status Quo

One digital ID for everything is one place to lose everything

A single state-issued identity for everything is also a single place where everything can leak, and a running log of where you went. You can't file an objection against a government. Here is what you can still do.

No. 06 · The Status Quo

Why 'anonymised' data can still identify you

When a company anonymises your data instead of deleting it, the obvious labels come off and the pattern stays on. The pattern is the part that is you, and a model is built to read it.

No. 05 · The Status Quo

The right to be forgotten, and the reasons you won't be

You have a legal right to be deleted. You also live under a dozen laws and clauses that keep you anyway. The fine print is where that tension plays out.

No. 04 · The Status Quo

The licence that outlives your account

You closed the account. The licence you granted didn't close with it. Here are the five tells that mark where it turns questionable.

No. 03 · The Status Quo

Every privacy policy is the same document

Read enough privacy policies at once and they collapse into one. The same handful of phrases turns up in all of them, each built to permit something. Here is the skeleton, and what to do once you can see it.

No. 02 · Dating & Matrimony

What a dating or matrimony app keeps on you

Your face, your faith, who you are drawn to, and every message you sent. Here is what these services collect, who they pass it to, and what survives the day you leave.

No. 01 · Identity & Age Verification

You proved your age with your face. Where did the scan go?

To open an account or see an adult site, you now hand your face or your passport to a checking company you never chose. They promise to delete it. Here is what 'deleted after the check' has actually meant.