Statle and the Infoliberate: the health trend that's watching you

It's 6AM, and high school junior Abby Schultz is ready to greet the day. As she hops in the shower, she asks her voice-activated speaker to start playing songs from an energetic wake-up playlist her friend made. She double-checks the weather on the tablet in her room to make sure she picks the right clothes, and an ad in the upper-right of the artist she was just listening to reminds her to put on mascara. Her smart watch registers her heart rate and her change in elevation as she runs down the stairs to the kitchen.

While making herself some scrambled eggs for breakfast, she queues up an episode of a TV series she's been bingeing on her family's streaming service subscription. The midroll ads are for an exercise clothing brand she's had her eye on. She posts a picture of her scrambled eggs, with a hazy filter and a sprinkle of hashtags for good measure. Quickly getting herself up to date with recent posts by her friends, she scrolls past an ad celebrating discounts on breakfast sandwiches at her favorite local fast-food chain. On her walk to school, she watches a few videos on her favorite video-sharing app, interspersed with checking messages from her friends on their group chat. Between videos, she gets an ad for the miniseries her friend was just gushing about.

All this seems like average internet usage for a teenager like Abby––multiple devices, multiple apps, a strong focus on media and connectedness––but for many, the extremely targeted and cross-device nature of the advertisements she receives is disturbing.

Not so for Abby. "I've given up my need for data privacy," she says.

As we approach her school, she explains by opening the Statle app on her phone. Her morning shows up on the app the way it always does for her: a highly organized but immense sea of data. One tab shows her fitness data, which keeps updating with her step count and heart rate as we walk. Another tab shows her browsing data, split up by app. Another tab shows all the devices that she either owns or are part of her family's network, with an option to filter other tabs by these devices. A "device network" tab shows those, as well as other devices she associates with––mainly her friends.

A subset of Abby Schultz's data on Statle, for a single day. The included sets are her browsing data, fitness data, advertisement viewing data, for September 20th, and her device network. This information is publicly available through Statle, and included in this article with Abby's enthusiastic consent.

Tapping on one of her friends jumps us into their Statle profile––with yet another overwhelming swarm of tabs. We see that her friend Jessica listened to the same three songs on repeat for most of the previous day, that she logged what she ate for breakfast and lunch but not dinner ("probably means it was pizza," Abby tells me), and that she spent $40 on socks at an online boutique.

"We all decided to go infolib together," she tells me. "We really like Yarola, and she's got a lot of videos now talking about it. She says it's the next best thing you can do for your emotional wellbeing, so we had to try it, you know?"

For the uninformed, "infolib" is short for "infoliberate," a growing trend of individuals willfully forsaking their data privacy, for any number of real or perceived benefits. In Abby's case, she's inspired by Priscilla Yaro (@yarola), one of many online gurus calling this practice the "absolution from privacy." Yaro, whose bio describes her as a "Zenergizer battery," claims that "clinging to data privacy prevents ... [people] from achieving the benefits of the principle of non-attachment." Similar users, like Jessie Cao (@buddhisitter) and Benji Schuler (@benzen9), echo this message of info-liberation as "shining a light on the shadow self" or "embodying mindfulness in the network of joy." Schuler in particular frequently posts about infolib as a mindfulness tool: "revealing to all my DATA means seeing all my DATA. i am becoming a more active and watchful mind." All three have active accounts on Statle.

Posts from Priscilla Yaro (@yarola) and Benji Schuler (@benzen9) from jamcam

Jessie Cao (@buddhisitter) sat for an interview earlier this year, and her summary of the movement is the most quoted in other articles:

The absolution of privacy is going after two things at once. For me, the more important one is mindfulness––the act of being aware of life as you're living it. Before trying out infolib for myself, I found it very difficult to exist mindfully in the digital space, with what felt like invisible demons watching my every mood. Everyone told me I needed to protect that sense of fear––that I should feel scared of the attention. By releasing my need to protect a virtual identity through Statle, I can see everything I'm doing, and that makes me aware of everything I'm doing. I actually wind up using the internet a few hours less per day, because awareness made me realize what activity I didn't need. The other part is the deliberate act of non-attachment, which Yaro and Serepin focus on more. Holding on to your data creates a lot of suffering for a lot of people, so telling yourself you're letting go gets you a little closer to your highest self.

So, if you're following the absolution movement, your reason for joining Statle is simple: release everything, improve your mind. How well has that worked for Abby?

"Total game-changer," she tells me. "I used to be super into posting photos on other apps, which was fun, but kind of exhausting. I'd get so focused on how many likes or comments it had, and if I didn't get enough, it felt terrible." She shows me some of them (through Statle)––they're photos of food she ate, her dogs, and occasional selfies. "But when I started using Statle, that stopped mattering. Everything I was already doing is on here, and there's so much of it that I could never get through it all. It's really nice to just go get a doughnut and not have to care about it or post about it, while also being aware I'm doing it. I feel so much freer." She still posts on other apps, she says, but not nearly as much as she used to.

Statle has had some direct benefits for her friend group, as well. "Shantae had, like, a week where all she was looking at was diet and exercise blogs. We could see it on her browsing history, and some of the pages were kinda... weird. She's not fat or anything, so it didn't really make sense." The group brought this up with her, and she admitted she was trying to eat less. "Like, way less. Nothing, basically." Abby and her friends were able to convince Shantae to consider seeing someone about a potential eating disorder. "It felt good to help her."

Statle's detractors have a much different story. Geraldine Hastings of the International Privacy Research Initiative (IPRI) regularly speaks out against the service for its obvious connection to advertisers:

Users have a right to separate their private life from their public life. [Statle] gathers and distributes data constantly––you have no idea who you're handing your data to. Spiritually-motivated users are doxxing themselves for perceived socio-spiritual benefit. It's ludicruous.

Dr. James Ito Watanabe, a prominent Buddhist scholar, disagrees with the absolution movement on a number of religious and philosophical points. "They lead with the assumption that data is a direct reflection of the self," he writes in an email. "I take issue with that, first of all––data is an artifice left by human action, not the human himself. You could consider art a form of data. It is beautiful in our ease of interpreting it. But the Buddhist principle of nekkhamma does not ask for a renunciation of the self, as the infoliberate movement seems to imply. Non-attachment is a practice of removing oneself from that which causes suffering, mainly thoughts or deeds imbued with sensual, ill-will, or harmful characteristics.

When asked whether he believed data could embody any of these characteristics, he responded: "Again, the data is a record. In itself it is meaningless. But the actions behind it can. Gambling is a harmful habit, which causes a lot of suffering. The money gained or lost through gambling does not directly cause distress, but the impact it has on the individual certainly can cause suffering.

"By which I mean: can the data itself cause suffering, or is it the actions which create the data that cause suffering? It seems to me that the infolib identity is merely a red herring to entice the user to spend more time online."

In contrast to Abby, some infoliberates take a more practical stance on Statle's benefits. Jamal Owens, a 24-year-old freelance writer, uses Statle to help pay off his student loans. "Statle lets me sell my own data, rather than all these platforms anonymously taking it. I know exactly what's in there, and I know who I'm selling it to. I can choose not to sell it to political campaigns or car insurance companies or whatever." Statle's profiles are publicly viewable, which has also become a shortcut in other areas of his life. "I dropped my Statle profile code down when I applied for the apartment I'm living in now. The rental company jumped my application to the top of the list, but I don't know if that was because I had an account, or because it's clear from my account that I'm not out starting fires."

To Owens, the money matters. "The gig economy is rough––some months are great, others are bone-dry, but bills don't ever stop. You have to put yourself out there all the time to get work, and I hate pushing myself on social media. So instead I've got Statle as my side-hustle, and all I have to do for the money is do all the [redacted] I'm already doing online."

Like many other "practical" infolibs, Owens has to ignore the spiritual ecosystem growing up around Statle and its competitors. "The absolution idiots?" he chuffs. "Just a lot of kids who don't know what they're giving up, or what they're getting in return. Yeah, I put my best self forward as much as I can, but the app is a business, just like I'm a business. Statle's my edge in the game right now, but damn is it weird to meet women who've jumped all the way down to my prom photos."

And does Abby know what becomes of her data? "Oh, sure," she says. "But Yaro's thing is that for full detachment, you have to agree to the unknown. So I just hit 'Consent' when the alert pops up in the morning to tell me who's getting my data today. I used to read the whole notice, but I feel much freer not knowing." For Abby, the money she makes mostly goes to charity, with a small remainder going towards makeup, movies, and snack trips. "Buddhisitter does a weekly non-profit post, so I usually just donate it to whatever she's mentioning. It's a neat feeling––like I'm using who I am to help the planet."

Absolution aside, she doesn't mind that her closer relationship with advertisers comes with some perks. "Normally I don't get bagels because I don't want to spend that much, but sometimes my breakfast posts get me good coupons. This one's for 50% off, which is on the low side, but still good. Do you want to get bagels?"

The implications of Statle are still so much larger. I ask Abby: who in your school is using this app? She goes to the device network tab and expands it out a couple times. The number of interconnected nodes is impossible to parse while walking, so I do some digging later.

I have yet to sign up for a Statle account myself, but to explore the issue further, I decide to sign up as a company, which allows me to buy Abby's data. Each dimension (tab) of data has its own cost that scales up depending on how many columns there are in the dataset.

Pricing options when purchasing data from Statle for the first time as a company account. Pricing is current as of the publication of this article.

There's a bulk pricing option to buy the last 30 days of browsing data for her entire expanded network, and a 30-day subscription to their analytics tools if I make the purchase in the next 30 minutes. I take the bait.

Abby's high school has about 3000 students in it; approximately a third of them use Statle. The vast majority of them are under 18, which Hastings says has dubious implications. "Most children and teenagers have smartphones and are highly active users," she says. "They're already being advertised to via these apps. For them, or in some cases their parents, they only see the benefits of becoming active participants in the process."

Arnold Shin, a teacher at Abby's school, worries about Statle constantly. "High school is a tough age. These kids are in the process of questioning themselves, and they shouldn't be forced to broadcast those questions online. A student last year got outed as gay because he forgot Statle was watching his browsing history. Luckily, his parents were open-minded, but that story could have ended much differently."

Statle's analytics tools give me unprecedented flexibility with this enormous data set. Most of the users in Abby's high school are female––Shin chuckles and mentions "male viewing habits" as a primary reason why some boys haven't jumped onboard. I can see what topics they talk about in chat by frequency, breakdowns of friend groups and where they intersect, who ranks as most popular based on social media profile views, what ads they've seen recently, how many of those ads have worked, and in some cases, what they spend money on.

Simplified view of Abby's immediate social sphere inside of Statle Analytics. Clicking any individual device opens "solutions" available for that particular user, or for broader categories the user could be assigned to.

When I bring up the spending tab and Jessica's $40 socks with Hastings, she laughs, bitterly. "Can you imagine? Being handed pre-profiled spending habits based on the individual? Connecting that to all the advertisements a user has seen, correlating that against how and when this person has spent money, finding the perfect time to strike with a 10% off coupon that has proven to be this person's spending weakness based on well-curated, bulk-purchasable data? Oh, god, it must be a holy grail for them."

I ask her if she's worried about the potential for the government to access or misuse Statle's vast troves of data. "I can think of two unwarranted arrests in the last three months that the IPRI pushed for an official statement on, and got no satisfactory answer from the police. Researching the victims, we noticed that their accounts had mentions of drug use. In the case of Jonathan South, he wasn't a Statle user, but a visiting friend had an account and had his location tracking on. We think they were able to connect the two through the extended device network."

This raises another question––does the IPRI have a Statle organization account? "Unfortunately so," Hastings admits. "The data they get requires extensive user permission, which they've gotten in spades thanks to the degree of buy-in from their user base. We tried assembling our own information network based on scraping websites and other databases, but there's no other way to get chat information, emails, credit card purchases, and location data. Since this is the data that's used in data-informed arrests and discrimination, Statle is what helps us find proof."

"I've seen the data they have on me," she continues. "I don't have a personal account, but anyone with an account is constantly collecting information on everyone they come in contact with. It could be your bus driver, your waiter, your doctor, even someone else in a public restroom. When we got an account for IPRI, I searched for myself on some of the datasets we bought. I found some email threads I was in with people I didn't realize had Statle accounts. The location of a blind date I went on, how much he spent on dinner, where he went afterwards. People who'd been searching my name online, who'd posted about me.

"Paradoxically, it makes me feel a little closer to the absolution movement. If they're already collecting on me whether I approve of it or not, isn't it easier to give up?"

Later that day, Abby takes me to get bagels, motivated by her 50% off coupon. Two of her friends join us––one who also got the coupon, and one who got a different coupon to a local smoothie place instead. Jamal's rental application process springs to mind, and I have to ask: does Statle factor into their college applications?

"Oh, sure, some of the colleges ask for our Statle accounts," says one of the friends. "It's not a requirement, but I think it probably helps. It's the closest to totally honest you can be, way closer than an essay, right?"

They're all planning to go to college once they graduate. Just to make conversation, I ask them what they think they'll major in. One says psychology. One says fashion design.

"Marketing," says Abby.