My Brother Thought Patriot Mobile Would Protect His Data

"I told him if I saw him in the driveway, I'd shoot him on the spot." My brother's eyebrows up; his face resolute.

"Over asking for some spare cans of food?" I ask, my eyebrows raised, unconvinced and skeptical.

He seems puzzled by my disbelief and raises his voice, soaking his response with incredulity. "YeAh! We pUt iN YEARS oF WoRk. I WiLl absolutely pRoTecT mY CasTle!"

With Civil War II on the horizon every day, my brother was proud of his hoard of food and supplies and ready to defend his home "Second Amendment-style."

"You should get a gun, Becks. You'll want to protect your family, too, when people start trying to steal from you."

"Dude. You forget I was a Gunner's Mate in the Navy. My job was to train people on weapon safety and how to shoot straight. Even our leadership could barely hit a stationary target if the wind was too strong. I have no hope whatsoever that you, or anyone else, shooting up trees in the backyard will do anything more than waste bullets and hurt yourself. Plus, you live in a town with a population of 100, with zero thru traffic. Nobody even knows you're here. It's ridiculous that you think you'll ever need to defend your property."

"I might!" He rebutted. "When people get hungry, they get desperate!"

"There are hungry, desperate people right now! You hate on them because you're convinced they're poor because they're lazy."

"When everyone is affected by the government, you're gonna see an uprising…" He starts.

"For fuck sake. You're in crushing medical debt despite both of you working full time for decades, which is you affected by the government refusing to provide healthcare like other industrialized countries. The fact that you're looking for a way to not have your data tracked is you affected by your government's lack of regulatory policies.

Here you're convinced that when things are bad enough for people, they'll come after what you have. Bro, people are already desperate. What do they do? Apply for food stamps and get harassed by people like you.

You seem to have this crazy idea that the worst is on the horizon. No. For many, they are living their worst right now. There won't be a war where you have to defend your chickens. If anything, many of us will become destitute along with those who already are. We still won't storm your castle, just like no one is storming now."

"Suit yourself." He says. 'I just hope you guys survive out there," punctuating the sentence with a huff. "So. Do you guys know much about phone carriers? We're looking at Patriot Mobile 'cause they don't track your data."

My husband perked up. "They're not going to protect your data. Carriers have nothing to do with it."

"Really?" He looks back and forth to me and my husband. He looks like those times when Dad made him feel bad, and he would look to Mom for help. But he snaps out of it, "Well, I'd love to learn more about this. If I'm wrong, I want to know."

Words I've never heard from him in over 40 years.

"You're on Facebook and Google?" My husband asks. My brother nods.

"They're the ones tracking you."

"Exactly," I said. "There's a reason why you see ads for guns on your Facebook feed and I don't."

My brother's face is a combination of computer processing and conspiracy-cult beliefs wrestling inside a tornado.

He finally speaks. "So, how do I protect my data?"

"You can't," My husband says. "Every time you use the apps on your phone, your data is collected and sold. Your phone even tracks where you are so it can recommend local ads to you on whichever app you open."

Panic is taking over my brother's face.

"Going forward, you can switch back to a call and text-only phone. But if you use a computer, it's the same thing. Just being on a browser is putting your info out there."

"Babes, are you hearing this?" My brother looks over to his wife.

"Oh, yah." She replies.

A last-ditch effort to cling to hope and keep believing that something named Patriot is there to protect him, "But Patriot Mobile says it can protect my data."

"It's just marketing." I feel a tiny bit bad because he looks so defeated, but not really. He's almost 50 years old and should know better by now. "Which you're clearly susceptible to." I say.

His face has gone from shock to shame to despair. "Huh. Well. I guess there's no sense in changing our carrier."

Awkward silence.

Suddenly, he perks up. "You guys want to go see the chickens?" We agree just to help change the mood.

We head out through the kitchen to grab our jackets from the hall closet. I pull them out from the overstuffed space. I look at the shelf over my head.

"That's a lot of ammunition, dude."

"Yeah, but don't say anything to anyone. I'm serious. Not even on Facebook. I don't want the government knowing I have guns."

*Original published in Medium*