My granddad passed away on Christmas Day, 2017.
Eight years later, his name is still on mailing lists. Still being targeted. Companies bought his data from somewhere, who bought it from somewhere else, who bought it from the original source that collected it without meaningful consent in the first place.
My dad can’t stop it. There’s no token to revoke. No ledger showing who has his information. No automated system sending deletion requests to the dozens of data brokers still treating a deceased man as an active consumer.
He also mentioned his own charity donations — given in good faith — somehow ended up on marketing lists he never agreed to.
That’s not a technical problem. That’s a dignity problem.
I left Verizon in December 2025 after 18 years — the last 15 leading technical support teams. For 15 of those years I listened to escalated calls. I read the messages. I sat with customers who had been financially hurt, legally exposed, emotionally devastated — almost always because of what happened to their data. Most of the time the solution wasn’t compensation or a fix. It was someone willing to listen.
I listened. And I kept asking the same question: how could this have been prevented?
The answer I kept coming back to: ownership. If people owned their data — truly owned it, with enforcement, not just policy — the equation changes.
I have a concept I call the Law of 3s. You decide to do something. You decide not to do something. Or you never had a choice. For most people on the internet today — their data, their privacy, their identity — it’s become the third option. Not a choice at all.
My understanding of copyright law and music publishing taught me this pattern early. Ownership extraction follows the same playbook across every industry. Artists have spent decades fighting just to own what they created. Your data is no different — someone else is holding the masters.
Adworth changes that.
The current consent model — cookie banners, “I agree” buttons, vague privacy policies — is an honor system. There’s no cryptographic guarantee that a user actually consented to what an advertiser is doing with their data, and no way for the user to enforce a “no” once they’ve said it.
So I built one.
No single AI, corporation, or government will regulate itself. But consumers, through regulation, are already demanding transparency and control. The infrastructure to deliver it didn’t exist yet.
That’s what I’m building.
I built it with 20 years of corporate experience, AI as my co-founder, and the conviction that the knowledge needed to solve real problems doesn’t come with a price tag. That’s what AI should do. Work with us. Not instead of us.
The patent was filed February 23, 2026. The consent infrastructure is live today: signed tokens, verified at the transaction layer, recorded on a tamper-evident ledger. Now I’m raising $1.5M to build it properly — ship the extension, sign the first advertisers, and reach the next stage from real traction.
The goal isn’t just privacy. It’s increasing your Adworth — the way you build net worth, but for your data. Because owning what’s yours increases self worth too.
For my granddad. And for everyone still getting mail they never asked for.