Every click, pause, scroll, and search gets recorded and analyzed. Platforms monitor how long you hover over content, what time of day you're most active, which device you're using, and even how fast you scroll past certain posts.

Why this happens: Platforms use behavioral tracking to build detailed profiles that predict what will keep you engaged longest. More engagement = more ad revenue or subscription retention.

The cost to you: You're always being watched and analyzed, even when you're just browsing casually. This creates psychological pressure and makes it impossible to explore freely without it affecting your future recommendations. One curious click can change your feed for months.

Privacy impact: Behavioral data reveals intimate details about your mental state, relationships, finances, health concerns, and daily routines—often more than you'd willingly share.

Instead of asking what you like, platforms guess based on incomplete signals. A paused video might mean you loved it—or your phone rang. A finished series might mean it was amazing—or you were too lazy to find something else. Clicking on a news article doesn't mean you agree with it—but the algorithm assumes you do.

Why this happens: Platforms would rather guess than interrupt your experience with questions, even if those guesses are wrong.

The cost to you: You get trapped by misunderstood behavior. That true crime show you watched while sick in bed? Now you're a "true crime fan". That angry political post you clicked by accident? Now you're fed more extreme content from that perspective.

Accuracy problem: Studies show algorithmic inference is wrong 30-40% of the time about user intent, but platforms act on it anyway because it's "good enough" for engagement metrics.

(30-40% based on data available as of 12/22/2025)

Your preferences, behaviors, demographics, and interests are packaged and sold to third parties. Data brokers buy this information and combine it with data from other sources to build comprehensive profiles that follow you across the internet.

Why this happens: For many platforms, selling access to you (through targeted advertising) is the primary business model. You're not the customer—you're the product being sold to advertisers.

The cost to you: Your information is monetized without your meaningful consent. Even "anonymized" data can often be re-identified. Your data gets sold to companies you've never heard of, for purposes you'd never approve, creating risks you can't predict.

Scale of the problem: The data broker industry is worth over $200 billion annually. Your personal information is likely being sold by dozens of companies you've never directly interacted with.

Once the algorithm decides who you are, it shows you more of the same, creating a self-reinforcing loop. You watch action movies → algorithm shows more action → you watch them (because that's what's available) → algorithm becomes more certain you're an action fan → shows even more action → your options narrow further.

Why this happens: Platforms optimize for engagement and retention, not discovery or growth. They've learned that familiar content keeps people watching longer, even if it makes them less satisfied long-term.

The cost to you: Your digital world shrinks. New interests become hard to develop because the algorithm won't show you different content. You stagnate intellectually and culturally, seeing less diversity in perspectives, genres, and ideas. Personal growth becomes algorithmically suppressed.

Breaking free is hard: Even actively searching for different content doesn't always work—the algorithm may still filter results or recommendations through its existing understanding of "who you are."

Platforms are incentivized to maximize "time on site" and "engagement" because that's what drives advertising revenue or justifies subscription prices. They use psychological tricks—infinite scroll, autoplay, notification badges, FOMO-inducing features—to keep you hooked.

Why this happens: The business model requires capturing and monetizing your attention. Success is measured in daily active users, average session length, and ad impressions—not in user wellbeing or satisfaction.

The cost to you: Your time and mental energy are being extracted for profit. Features are designed to be habit-forming, not helpful. You're manipulated into spending more time than you intended, often at the expense of sleep, productivity, relationships, and mental health.

The addiction economy: Former platform engineers have admitted to deliberately designing features to be psychologically addictive, using techniques borrowed from gambling and behavioral psychology.

Recommendation algorithms are proprietary "black boxes." You can't see why you're being shown specific content, how decisions about you are being made, or what data is being used to profile you. When recommendations feel wrong, you have no way to understand or fix the underlying problem.

Why this happens: Platforms claim algorithmic transparency would reveal competitive secrets or enable gaming the system. In reality, opacity also hides bias, errors, and manipulative practices that users would object to if they understood them.

The cost to you: You can't make informed decisions about your digital experience. You can't contest unfair algorithmic decisions. You can't understand why you're seeing certain content or being excluded from opportunities. You're subject to automated decisions with no transparency or recourse.

Accountability gap: Without transparency, platforms can't be held accountable for algorithmic bias, discrimination, or manipulation. Users are powerless to challenge systems they can't see or understand.

Meity doesn't track your behavior, monitor your activity, or collect data in the background. You create fractures by deliberately choosing what preferences, interests, and boundaries you want to define. Nothing gets added to your profile unless you put it there.

How this works: You build fractures like filling out a form: "For my streaming fracture, I want recommendations in sci-fi, documentaries, and international films. I'm open to challenging content. Don't show me horror or romantic comedies." That's it. No behavioral surveillance required.

The benefit to you: Complete control and transparency. You know exactly what information exists about you because you created all of it. No hidden profiles, no inferred data, no surprises.

You can be incomplete: Unlike platforms that infer data to fill gaps, Meity is comfortable with sparse data. You decide how much or how little to share. Leaving things undefined is a valid choice that Meity respects.

Instead of guessing what you want based on clicks and behaviors, Meity uses what you explicitly tell it. You state your preferences in plain language: "I want to explore new music genres," "I'm interested in career pivots into tech," "Show me recipes for someone with dietary restrictions."

How this works: Fractures are preference declarations, not behavioral histories. You're telling AI systems who you are and what you want, rather than letting them guess from incomplete signals.

The benefit to you: Accuracy and control. You're never "misunderstood" by an algorithm because there's no interpretation—just your direct input. Changed your mind? Update your fracture. The AI adapts instantly without needing to "retrain" on new behavioral data.

Context without surveillance: You can provide helpful context ("I'm a parent looking for family-friendly content") without being monitored to infer that information from your behavior.

Meity's business model is infrastructure-as-a-service. Platforms pay for API access to query your fractures when you authorize them. We make money from usage fees, not from selling your information to third parties, advertisers, or data brokers.

How this works: When Netflix (for example) wants recommendations for you, they pay Meity a small API fee to query your streaming fracture. They get better recommendation data; we get infrastructure revenue. Your data never leaves the encrypted system or gets sold to anyone else.

The benefit to you: Your information is never commodified or sold. There's no incentive for Meity to collect more data than you provide, share it with third parties, or exploit it for advertising. Our success depends on your trust, not your exploitation.

Contractual commitment: This isn't just a promise—it's in our terms of service as a binding commitment. We can't sell data without fundamentally changing our business model, which would require user notification and consent.

Meity helps you escape algorithmic prisons by letting you define multiple versions of yourself. Create a fracture for exploration and discovery separate from your "comfort zone" fracture. Update fractures as you evolve. Delete old fractures that no longer represent you.

How this works: You can have a "Current Me" streaming fracture and an "Exploratory Me" fracture. Use the first when you want reliable comfort content, the second when you want to branch out. Platforms see whichever fracture you activate, breaking the prison of your historical data.

The benefit to you: Personal growth becomes possible again. You're not trapped by who you were—you can deliberately choose to expand your interests, explore new perspectives, and evolve without your past limiting your future.

Fresh starts anytime: Delete a fracture and create a new one. Start over whenever you want. Your history doesn't have to be your destiny.

Meity charges platforms small fees each time they query your fractures for recommendation data. Think of it like Stripe for payments or Auth0 for authentication—infrastructure companies that provide valuable services platforms pay for.

How this works: A platform integration might cost $0.001 per query. For 1 million users querying once daily, that's $1,000/day in infrastructure revenue. This scales sustainably as more platforms integrate and more users join.

The benefit to you: Meity succeeds when platforms value the infrastructure, not when we exploit your data. We're incentivized to build trust, provide value, and protect your information—because if users leave, platforms stop paying.

Aligned incentives: Unlike advertising-based models where more surveillance = more revenue, our model means better privacy = more user trust = more platform adoption = more revenue. Protecting you is how we profit.

Meity's core infrastructure will be open source, meaning our code is publicly available for anyone to review, audit, and verify. You can see exactly what we do with your data, how fractures are stored and encrypted, and how API queries work.

How this works: Security researchers, privacy advocates, and developers can examine our codebase to verify our claims. If we say "we can't read your encrypted fractures," you can check the encryption implementation yourself. Transparency isn't a marketing claim—it's verifiable reality.

The benefit to you: You don't have to trust our promises—you can verify our practices. Open source creates accountability. If we tried to add surveillance features or data collection, the community would see it immediately and sound the alarm.

Community security: Open source means thousands of eyes examining the code for vulnerabilities, bugs, or privacy issues. This makes Meity more secure and trustworthy than closed-source alternatives where problems can hide.