Friends and family,

This quarter really flew by! I wanted to take a moment to share with you the wonderful progress we’ve made at My Data Union. Those of you who signed up for this newsletter are among my earliest supporters, and I sincerely thank you for your encouragement, wisdom, and love. It means the world to me.

The Daylight platform

Randy Bator, our CTO, and I made progress towards the goal of operating a trusted environment where people can manage their data with the release of the ‘Daylight’ platform, the destination for the tools we publish. Coming from investment land, I envision it like a TD Ameritrade or similar investment custodian platform that helps people manage their traditional, investable property, such as stocks and bonds. The first step is for people to understand what they own, what it’s worth, who’s taking it for free, and how they can protect their property.

The first two tools in beta version of ‘Daylight’ are ‘App Score’ and ‘Portfolio Score.’ App Score defines scores for applications based on how much agency people have when using an app, coupled with an in-depth report of what’s going on under the hood. We take that information, combine it with my interpretation of the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and offer people an inventory list and valuation of the data being extracted from them. I want people to think of it as a nutrition label for their apps. There’s nothing like it on the market today.

Portfolio Score allows people to combine nutrition labels from all their apps into one single macronutrient report. When combined, the data tells a more comprehensive story about the person and the identity the data economy prescribes them. It is also meant to red flag invasive apps that the person may not know are on their device.

Both tools went through a closed beta test in May, and the responses were very encouraging. A sincere thank you to those who participated! You’ll see changes roll out over the course of the year. If you haven’t done so already, please check it out at mydataunion.tools and let me know what you think 😊.

Do it for the ‘gram

The personal IG account (@therealryanbroderick) hopped on the content train this quarter. The first campaign targets FIFA World Cup goers who downloaded the spyware app FIFA published and might like to know what their app is collecting, who FIFA and its partners sell their data to, and how to stop (some of) the collection. Over the past thirty days, the nine reels generated about 8.3k views and touched about 4.1k unique accounts. Considering this account is new with fewer than 100 followers, I am content with this reach and have a plan to keep consistently posting. If you haven’t already, please follow along on that channel. The three most impactful ways to appease the resident algo-God are to: 1) watch the reels as long as you can; 2) use the “share” button to repost or DM the content; and 3) like the content.

Many thanks to Michael Casimir (@mikecasimirviola), a man I’m proud to call a lifelong friend, who has been extremely helpful by teaching me this new skillset. Taking a dive into the unknown is easier when you’re surrounded by immensely talented people like Mike.

Please give Sara a big hug next time you see her; she’s seen our living room get consumed by a large green screen, filming equipment, and a soon-to-be-retired PC that sounds like a ticking bomb. You’d never know about the invasion based on her unrelenting encouragement for My Data Union and support for me. Te quiero muchísimo, mi amor.

Forming the band

The hardest parts of this venture are driving awareness and planting a rally flag. I’m convinced the content we publish on socials, which is derived from the articles published on MyDataUnion.com, will address the awareness part of the equation. Since I am still playing catchup with my socials and building a content backlog, new content on the site was slow in the second quarter. Nevertheless, there was great new content! Such as:

• How to disguise your email address with Apple: Your email address is a silent barcode that lets data brokers stitch your identity together across every service you touch; this shows you how to use Apple’s free masking tools to hand out a different disposable address every time.
• What is “personalization”?: “Personalization” is the industry’s friendliest-sounding word, and this pulls back the curtain on how it often just means surveillance pricing, like the airline that charged one traveler $230 more based on what it knew about them.
• 4 steps to opt out of ChatGPT’s ad business: You were quietly opted into ChatGPT’s new ad business without anyone asking; here are four steps to opt back out, on any device.
• What kind of party is this, anyway? Zero, first, and third-party, explained: The industry hides how it profits from you behind confusing jargon, so this decodes zero-, first-, and third-party data in plain English so you can see exactly when your information changes hands.
• Shining Daylight on the FIFA World Cup app: Our first Daylight case study: the official FIFA World Cup app hands your government ID, precise location, and demographics to more than 25 companies quietly embedded inside it. Here’s how to shut most of that pipeline off.

Creating a convincing rally flag is the next critical step. Companies don’t listen to 10 users with 10 different opinions…but are forced to when 10k users speak with one voice. Like a group of shareholders, labor union, or talent agency, negotiating leverage is created by forming a bloc of like-minded people and pushing for the same things that benefit them all. The plan is to first gather many people clearly under the My Data Union umbrella and then put that collective weight to work on their behalf. That means negotiating for better terms, enforcing those terms, coordinating mass opt-outs and deletion requests, and ultimately opening a path for members to license some of their data on their own terms and get paid for it. This is the part of the journey I am most excited about because it puts my activist investor experience and crankiness to good use 😊. I’m excited to share that we are working on a creative call to action in the second half of 2026. Stay tuned!

…

Thank you for being here and showing your support for me and what we’re building at My Data Union. I believe, with every ounce of my body, that people must have representation in a market that’s exploiting them. Until they have a seat at the table, the exploitation will never stop. The velocity increases exponentially as new AI tools hit the market to make computing massive quantities of data a cinch. We must solve for this problem now or it’ll never happen.

Sincerely and with gratitude,

Ryan Broderick

In loving memory of Uncle Peter Broderick. Gone too soon. Never forgotten.