The data trail
A patient file, a client contract, a board memo. Once a tool may reuse what you put in, it takes four steps for that file to become a product. Watch it flow below, then follow one file step by step, and see the same file on Wysor.
Watch it flow
Doctors, lawyers and companies hold different secrets, but the route to market is the same: remove what points to a person or a client, keep what is valuable, and offer it to whoever pays.
Data marketplace
“Anonymous” records, priced per row
Switch between a practice, a law firm and a company, and turn streams on or off. Watch listings in the marketplace: some get cross-referenced until the name comes back. Organisations, names and prices are invented examples.
And then the name comes back
Removing the name does not remove the person. A few ordinary details, each harmless on its own, are enough to point at exactly one human being. Buyers hold other datasets, and AI does the matching in seconds. Try it.
The “anonymous” record a buyer holds
No name, no birth date, no insurance number. By law, this row is anonymous. Now add what else is usually known about it.
Clues from other data: tap to add
People this record could belong to
83,000,000
The numbers above are an illustration. That it works is documented:
87% identifiable from postcode, birth date and sex
Harvard Gazette99.98% re-identifiable from 15 attributes
Nature Communications, 2019AI infers age, location and income from text
ETH ZurichTry it
Choose who you are and what you are working on. Then switch between a tool that may reuse your content and Wysor.
1 · You are
2 · You work on
3 · In a tool where
Tap any line to see whether the law protects it.
Step 1 / 4
Everything in it is confidential. You owe that to your patient, your client or your company.
Illustrative example. Names and figures are invented. The market, the law and the cases behind it are documented with sources on our Legal to sell page.
This already happened
Not a thought experiment. Each of these is documented, and each started with data that was supposed to be private, anonymous or only used for one thing.
The US Federal Trade Commission found an online counselling service had shared email addresses, IP addresses and health questionnaire answers with Facebook, Snapchat and others for advertising, after promising privacy. It paid $7.8 million.
Duke University researchers asked data brokers for mental-health data. 11 sold it: lists of people with depression, anxiety, PTSD or bipolar disorder, one at $275 for 5,000 records, with little checking of who was buying.
A news site obtained commercially available app-signal data, matched a device to a senior US church official and reported that he used a gay dating app. He resigned.
After researchers re-identified people in a streaming service’s anonymised rating data, a closeted lesbian mother sued, saying her viewing history could out her. The company settled and cancelled a second data release.
After an EU antitrust investigation, a marketplace operator committed to stop using non-public data from the independent sellers on its platform for its own retail business, which competes with those same sellers.
A fitness app published a global heatmap built from a billion anonymised workouts. Analysts used it to trace the outlines of military bases and patrol routes in Syria, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
And the rest?
The quiet version happens every day. Legally.
Nobody calls it a scandal, because nobody breaks a rule. There is no hack, no leak, no headline. Just three ordinary steps, each one allowed, repeated millions of times.
A clause in the terms
You accepted a licence to reuse what you upload. Nobody reads it.
Legal
A name removed
The file is “anonymised”. Legally, it stops being personal data.
Legal
A sale
It is licensed, combined and resold. All above board, all invisible.
Legal
Real examples. All legal. No fine.
Pharmacy billing centres sell the prescription data they process to market research firms, earning several million euros a year from it. When a Bavarian data protection authority checked one, its verdict was: “The legal requirements for anonymisation are met.” Prescription data may be sold, as long as it is anonymised.
Ärzteblatt, 2013A German mobile operator set up a business selling anonymised movement data from its customers’ phones to retailers and city planners, using an anonymisation process it says was agreed with the authorities. Customers who object have to opt out themselves.
netzpolitik.org, 2016When a consumer genetics company went bankrupt, its customers’ genetic data was sold along with the business for $305 million. A bankruptcy judge approved the sale and overruled every objection.
GenomeWeb, 2025A large online forum licenses its users’ posts and comments to Google for AI training, for a reported $60 million a year, with a similar deal for OpenAI. It is covered by the terms its users accepted.
The Register, 2024A US state banned the sale of data on which drugs individual doctors prescribe without their consent. The US Supreme Court struck the ban down as a violation of free speech: physician confidentiality, it held, could not justify it.
US Supreme Court, 2011Legal is not the same as harmless. Here is why it matters for you.
I am a
The disclosure happens on upload, not on sale
Professional secrecy asks who received your client’s information and on what terms. A tool that may reuse your content is not just helping you work; it is a recipient with its own rights to the file. Whatever anonymisation follows comes after the information has already left your control.
The mandate itself is the secret
Your duty covers more than the client’s name: that they came to you at all, what happened, what they fear. A fact pattern from a small market, a known dispute or a deal of a certain size points straight back at your client.
The buyer can sit on the other side
Settlement floors, weak points and negotiating history are exactly what litigation analytics, funders and insurers pay for. Pooled across firms, your client’s position can end up informing the people across the table.
Discretion is what the client pays for
A client chooses a lawyer to keep things out of circulation. A clause, a price or a strategy resurfacing as a “market benchmark” is the opposite of what they hired you for, even if no law was broken.
The difference
Every step above depends on a right to reuse your content. Without that right, there is nothing to strip, nothing to pool and nothing to sell.
Want the sources? The companies, the laws and the court cases behind every step are on Legal to sell