Nilay Patel

I think I hear from our audience every day, why is this happening to me?

Why do these companies already know so much about me?

How come when I use my loyalty card at the grocery store, that gets –

meshed up with a bunch of purchase data on Instagram that gets combined with a bunch of data.

Like, why is my phone listening to me, right?

It's like basically the end result of that.

I'm like, I don't know that it's listening to you.

I think there's a lot of data about you that makes it appear that the phone is listening to you.

And that is more scary and less legible than the phone is listening to you.

Have we opted into Experian?

Do you think about that level of maybe we should ask everybody if we want to be tracked in this way or track as many people as we do?

One of the questions I have about that, and I think, again, this is going to be a theme of 2026 in our coverage, I feel, is that AI enables these things to happen at a different kind of scale.

Right?

Because you can automate the systems in a different way.

You can query the systems in a different way.

You can extract value from the data in different ways.

And I wonder – I agree with you, right?

Lenders need to mitigate their risk in some way.

They need to know who they're lending to.

They need to manage –