Everyone Has Receipts. No One Has a Record.
Georgina Merhom
SubscribeSign in
Everyone Has Receipts. No One Has a Record.<br>The consumer right that matters most in a world where AI makes decisions is not privacy. It is agency: the power to see, correct, and carry the information used to make decisions about your life.
Georgina Merhom<br>Aug 01, 2026
Share
My ex-fiancé still gets my mail.<br>I don’t know how much of it is private. I don’t know what he opens, what he reads, what he keeps. I don’t know who else has that address filed next to my name, or in how many systems, or for how long. What I know is that there is a version of me living inside other people’s records: forwarding addresses, account notes, old contact fields that were never updated and I have no way to see her, let alone correct her. She is out there making an impression on my behalf. She arrives before I do.<br>I used to think the thing I was afraid of was being exposed. The recurring nightmare a lot of people have, the one where you’re on stage in your underwear. I had a version of that. But the longer I spend building SOLO, the more I think I had the fear backwards. It isn’t the fear of being seen. It’s the fear of being seen wrong, by someone with the power to make a decision that could impact your life, in a file you’ll never get to read. We built a $50 billion-a-year data industry to decide what people can access and never gave them a mirror.
A year ago, I was on a different kind of stage, at a town hall, speaking with Andrew Yang, who, in my humble opinion, was ahead of his time in understanding how AI would reshape ordinary economic life.<br>The room was full of bankers, fintech leaders, policymakers, and consumer advocates. The conversation turned, as it always does, to consumer data and privacy. And I said very casually the thing my team had spent months hoping I would never say in public:<br>“I’m not sure I care that much about privacy. I kind of like that Instagram knows my style. It means I can just buy the dress.”
Not my finest moment, as the founder of a consumer reporting agency. But I meant it, and I still mean it, so let me say it again, more carefully.<br>I don’t mind that a restaurant knows I’m gluten-free. I want them to know. I want them to tell the next restaurant, honestly, because then I get shown things I can actually eat, and because if I order something dangerous I’d like someone in the room to know it could hurt me. What I want is to know that they know. I want to be able to change it when it changes, when I decide I’m done being gluten-free and resent the whole category. And I want it used for the reason I handed it over, not silently repurposed into something that gets used against me when I’m not looking.<br>That last part is the whole point. That’s the line nobody draws.<br>The invasion isn’t that my information exists. The invasion is secondary use: data I gave for one purpose, quietly turned into another. You log into your bank account once to make a payment, because it is the only method available at checkout. Later, the income data from that same account becomes the reason a landlord denies your application, and no one asked you, and you never find out which fact did it. You logged in to pay. You did not even know you were sharing your income. Now it is an input to a decision being made about your whole life. You cannot supplement it. You cannot even see it.<br>We keep calling that a privacy problem. It isn’t. Privacy is about whether you are seen. This is about whether you have any say in how your information is used to decide your life. That is agency, and agency is the graver thing to lose. You can survive being seen. It is much harder to survive being decided.
I learned the difference in a field where the stakes were never abstract.<br>I started my career as a data scientist in cyber threat intelligence, in the parts of the internet where harm organizes itself: the deep and dark web. I worked cases involving children recruited into terrorist networks through gaming apps. I traced money laundering through financial systems. It was work where being wrong about a person had consequences, so the field had a discipline the rest of the economy has simply chosen not to have.<br>The discipline was this: a model can tell you where to look. It cannot tell you what’s true.<br>In that world, prediction had a real but limited job. It surfaced patterns, filtered noise, pointed your attention. But you could not prosecute someone because a system found them suspicious. A signal was a place to start, not a verdict to act on. Once you had a suspect, the work shifted, toward evidence you could corroborate, toward records someone could confront and contest, toward a case that would survive scrutiny. The standard was never “the model thinks so.” The standard was whether it would hold up in a fair process.<br>Prediction is not proof. Risk is not guilt. Correlation is not evidence. A score is not a verdict.<br>And then I looked at consumer life and watched...