Every fact below is sourced from government reports, academic research, or court filings. Nothing is made up. This is what's happening on your home network right now.
Your internet provider — Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, whoever you pay for WiFi — can now legally collect and sell a record of every website you visit, every search you make, every app you use, and where you go with your phone. They don't need your permission.
This became law in April 2017 when Congress voted to remove the privacy rules that would have stopped them. In plain English: the companies you pay for internet are allowed to sell your personal information to anyone willing to buy it.
In 2021, the FTC looked into what AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, T-Mobile, CenturyLink, and Google Fiber actually do with your information. What they found:
• They record every website you visit, which apps you use, where you go, and who lives in your house
• They use this to build advertising profiles on you and your family — even though you're already paying them for service
• When people tried to opt out, several companies ignored the request or made it nearly impossible
• Some companies bought additional data about you from other sources and combined it with what they already had
Starting in 2012, Verizon quietly added invisible tracking codes to everything you did on your phone's web browser. Think of it like a hidden name tag that follows you around the internet — except you can't take it off, and advertisers can read it.
Verizon did this for two years without telling anyone. When they got caught, they paid a $1.35 million fine and finally let customers turn it off.
AT&T's fiber internet service had a program where they tracked everything you did online. If you wanted them to stop, you had to pay $29 more per month. You were already paying for internet — then they charged you again for the privilege of not being watched.
Researchers at Princeton University checked the top 1 million websites. They found that 75% of them have Google tracking code built in. Facebook tracks you on 25% of websites. The average website has 6 to 10 different companies watching what you do on it.
This means even if you don't use Google or Facebook, they're still building a profile on you based on which websites you visit.
If you have a Samsung, LG, Vizio, or Amazon Fire TV, it has a feature called ACR (Automatic Content Recognition). In simple terms: your TV takes snapshots of what's on screen and sends them back to the company so they know what you're watching, when, and for how long.
Researchers found Samsung TVs start sending data to Google, Facebook, and Netflix within 60 seconds of being turned on — even if you never signed into any of those services.
Vizio got caught doing this to 11 million TVs without telling anyone. The FTC fined them $2.2 million. They kept the tracking technology.
Amazon's Ring doorbell cameras have partnerships with over 2,000 police departments across the country. Police can request your footage without a warrant. In 2025, Ring announced a partnership with Flock Safety that would make camera data accessible to federal agencies — customers started returning their cameras to Amazon.
Americans have installed over 500 million smart home devices. Every speaker, camera, doorbell, and thermostat is a sensor that sends data back to whoever made it.
Companies that buy and sell personal information pay three times more for a child's profile than an adult's, because a child represents decades of future purchases. Advertising profiles are built on children from the moment they first touch a screen.
The government has fined companies hundreds of millions of dollars for violating children's privacy — and it keeps happening:
• YouTube: $170 million fine (2019) — collecting kids' data without parents knowing
• Epic Games (Fortnite): $275 million fine (2022) — tracking kids under 13
• TikTok: $5.7 million fine (2019) — same thing
Companies called "data brokers" buy location data from your phone apps, then sell it to anyone who pays — including police departments and federal agencies like ICE. No warrant required. They know where you go to church, what doctor you visit, and where your kids go to school.
In January 2025, the FTC took action against data brokers Gravy Analytics and Mobilewalla for collecting over 500 million people's precise location data and selling it to advertisers and government agencies. 33 data brokers in California were caught selling American data to foreign countries including China and Russia.
The average American home has over 17 devices connected to the internet — phones, tablets, laptops, smart TVs, gaming consoles, baby monitors, thermostats, doorbells, speakers. Every single one sends information about what you do through your internet provider.
Think of it this way: your WiFi router is the front door to your home's entire digital life. Right now, that door is wide open and your internet provider is standing in it, writing down everything that passes through.
In January 2025, the FTC took action against General Motors and OnStar for collecting and selling precise location data and driving behavior from millions of vehicles without properly telling drivers or getting their permission. Every turn, every stop, every trip — sold to insurance companies and data brokers.
If your car is "connected," it's doing the same thing your phone does: reporting where you go, when, and how you get there.
The United States has no comprehensive federal privacy law. Europe has GDPR. California has CCPA. But there is no national law that says companies can't collect and sell your personal information.
The data broker industry is worth over $300 billion. They spend tens of millions on lobbying every year to make sure a federal privacy law never passes. You are the product, and they intend to keep it that way.
That's your cut of the billions they made selling your personal information.
Remember how we said your router is the front door to your entire digital life? That's also where you fix the problem. If you protect the router, you protect every device in your home at once — phones, tablets, TVs, baby monitors, everything. No apps to install on each device. No settings to change on each phone.
GhostPort is a small box that plugs into your existing internet setup and does the protecting for you:
• Blocks over 1 million known trackers and ads — your smart TV stops reporting what you watch, your phone stops leaking data to apps
• Scrambles your internet traffic so your internet provider can't see what websites you visit — they just see encrypted noise
• 4 protection levels — you choose how much privacy you want, from basic to maximum
• Parental controls that actually work — block TikTok, Facebook, adult content on specific devices. Your kids can't get around it because it works at the network level, not on their device
• 320+ security issues found and fixed — every single one published publicly. No other router company does this because they have things to hide. We don't.
• 96% compliance with NIST — that's the security framework the US government uses for its own systems
One box. Plug it in. Every device in your home is protected. No monthly fee required for the core features. The hardware is yours forever.