They’re Denying Surgeries — Are They Tracking Our Cars, Too?
I feel like, as a collective, we’ve normalized the fact that privacy doesn’t really exist anymore. From the comfort of our couches, we can pull up divorce records of people we went to high school with and compare street images to see if their front yard quietly declined along with their marriage. If you want to take it further, you can even view a virtual tour of the house they once shared — then compare it to their new, separate living arrangements to get a sense of the new directions their lives have taken.
Privacy came to mind the other day when I randomly thought about a tool that’s pretty common for companies to use — one I had access to throughout my old career. It’s basically an advanced people search, but with access to things that would probably shock most people. In fact, I truly believe this is one of those rare things that 95% of us could agree on.
If I typed someone into the system, I could see burner phone numbers, email addresses that were never made public, speeding tickets, and a full report of their social media activity. Some of that might be findable online if you dug deep enough — but I could also see car registrations and every time their vehicle passed a license plate reader, with a photo.
To be fair, the companies I worked for had rules. We needed a legitimate business reason to run someone. I couldn’t proceed without entering the file number tied to the inquiry. But if I were corrupt? It wouldn’t have been hard to open a fake file just to generate a number, then close it later as “unfounded.” With that in mind, you should know the two industries using the tool the most are insurance and debt collection.
Think about it.
The insurance industry donates to the lawmakers we put into power to regulate them. Yet the costs are so high, the average household requires all adults to work for a corporation. Cars are needed to get to and from those jobs. Daycare too, for some. And multiple outfits are required — because corporations don’t allow employees to wear sweats and oversized T-shirts that actually give our FUPAs some relief (or, as Wanda Sykes calls it, “Her Esther”) — thanks in part to the lack of regulation in the food industry.
Although we all naturally have skills that could grow into our own businesses, we’re too exhausted or fearful to take the chance. Most employees are doing the work of multiple positions. We’re sick, depressed, and there’s no relief in sight. Then, when a necessary surgery gets denied — we start to unravel. We keep showing up to work, untreated, just trying to survive. The medical bills pile up. The savings vanish. And the debt collectors — possibly using advanced data tools to track our movements — start calling nonstop.
The wildest part? The billionaires behind the media corporations have convinced a huge chunk of the country that this is just how life works. It’s not. And the rest of the civilized world is laughing at us.
Industry totals from the last election cycle (2023–2024), via OpenSecrets.org:
Insurance: $24.6M donated, $155.2M lobbied
Auto: $7.95M donated, $85.5M lobbied
Food & Agriculture: $30.7M donated, $44.7M lobbied
At least $348.65 million spent — legally — by just a few industries. And that amount could fully support over 415,000 severely malnourished children for a year. If that money were spent to better the world instead of blocking regulations so they can take advantage of us, we would be healthier, happier, and our tax dollars would no longer be donations to the wealthy.
We could already be living in that better world — if we weren’t stuck battling the “serious issues” corporate media throws at us to keep us distracted and divided. If we get there before it’s too late, I believe our first order of business would be letting the insurance industry know: we’re onto you.
Then we remind the officials we elected to protect us that it’s the people — not the lobbyists handing out “bonuses” — who control their retirements.
Time is running out, and a few powerful players are betting the majority never figures out what’s been done to us.
Will history remember us as the generation that came together — or the one that suffered while a handful watched from their penthouses?
Oh — and guess who owns one of the most widely used “advanced people search” tools?
TransUnion.
One of the three private, for-profit credit corporations we never chose, never gave permission to, and yet they control our financial reputations, our privacy — and profit off our mistakes. The wildest part? We’re the ones who have to monitor them, because they keep making the mistakes.
Let’s Unite
jayxtwo.com | Substack & TikTok: @jayxtwo
California, New Jersey, and Maine have laws that block advanced people search tools like TLOxp from accessing license plate and real-time location data on their residents. TransUnion acquired TLO in 2013 and markets TLOxp as a leading investigative platform for insurance, collections, law enforcement, and corporate clients.
This piece reflects personal views and lived experience. All claims regarding systems, tools, and industries are based on publicly available information, cited sources, and common practices. Examples are representative and not allegations of illegal conduct by any individual or organization.