Your Data Rights · A Learn course · Coming soon
Everyone has that story, and nobody has been given a straight answer about it. This course is the straight answer: what companies collect about you, what they are allowed to do with it, what you can do back, and how all of that changes when you walk into work. Written for regular people, not lawyers.
Being written now. Coming to Android first, then iPhone and iPad.
Why this course
It feels too big to understand, so most people don’t try
Seventy-three percent of Americans say they have little or no control over what companies do with their data. Fifty-six percent click “agree” without reading. I don’t blame either group. The rules are spread across fifty states, a few federal agencies and the whole European Union, and nobody explains them in plain English.
I spent the last two years in law school studying exactly this: workplace privacy, cybersecurity law, AI governance, and how laws and regulations get made. The honest version of what I learned fits in a course a curious person can finish. That’s what this is.
It won’t make you a lawyer. It will let you look at a cookie banner, a smart TV setup screen, your work laptop or a chatbot and know what’s being collected, what gave them the right, and what you can do about it.
How every module works
Four short lessons, always in the same order
Once you know the shape, twenty-four modules stop feeling like a wall.
01
The story
A real incident, or a moment you’ve lived. A judge’s video rentals printed in a newspaper. Engineers pasting source code into a chatbot. Your TV reporting what you watched.
02
How it actually works
The mechanism, without the jargon. Not “they’re listening” but what they’re doing instead, which is usually stranger.
03
What the law says
Including the answer nobody wants: it’s legal. Unfair and illegal are different words, and knowing which one you’re dealing with changes what you can do.
04
Your move
One setting, one request, or one habit. Every module ends with something you can do that night.
Some of the stories
The law usually shows up about twenty years late, then hard
1987
A judge’s video rentals
During Robert Bork’s Supreme Court hearing, a reporter talked a video store into handing over the judge’s rental records and wrote about them. The list itself never ran, which isn’t how the story usually gets told. Congress was rattled enough to pass a law protecting rental records within a year, and that 1988 law is still being used today, against tracking pixels on video sites.
2017 to 2026
The TV that watches you
You fought for the right to record TV shows in 1984 and won. Now your smart TV records what you watch and sells it. Vizio was fined for it in 2017. In 2025 Texas sued five TV makers over it, and two of them settled in 2026 by agreeing to a real consent screen.
2023
Source code into the chatbot
Samsung engineers pasted confidential code into ChatGPT to fix bugs. Three leaks in about twenty days, then a company-wide ban. This is why your annual compliance training keeps mentioning “data classification.”
2024 to 2026
Your car told your insurer
GM’s OnStar sent drivers’ braking and speeding data to data brokers, who sold it to insurers. Some premiums went up without the driver knowing why. The FTC banned it for five years, and California collected $12.75 million.
2026
The company that said it was listening
One marketing firm actually sold advertisers “Active Listening” through your phone. In May 2026 it and two other firms agreed to pay $930,000 to settle with the FTC, which found the product never listened to anyone. It was recycled data broker lists dressed up as eavesdropping.
The outline
24 modules, from “how did they know?” to a one-page plan
Each module is four lessons of about five minutes. Module titles are working titles and will move around as the lessons get written.
Part I
The mystery
The one question everyone has, answered properly.
- 1The ad that knew
Part II
How law works for regular people
Four tools you need before anything else makes sense: contracts, harm, statutes and regulators.
- 2“I Agree”: the contract you never read
- 3When something is unfair: harm, courts and the fine print
- 4Who makes the rules
Part III
What they collect
The objects in your house, one at a time.
- 5Cookies: what the banner is really asking
- 6The file on you: data brokers
- 7The settings screen, decoded
- 8The screen that watches back: your TV
- 9Your car, your speaker, your doorbell
- 10The price that knows your name
Part IV
Where you live changes your rights
The internet feels global. Your rights are local.
- 11Your four rights, and which states give them
- 12How Germany reaches a website in Ohio
- 13Special cases: kids, faces, health
Part V
What companies owe you
The promises companies make, and what they owe you when they break them.
- 14The privacy policy: a promise or a disclosure?
- 15When they lose your data
- 16Why you attest every year
Part VI
At work
The place you spend most of your day, and the device you don’t own.
- 17Facebook on the work laptop
- 18Interviews, background checks and drug tests
- 19Fired for a post
- 20Your side of the deal: company data and AI tools
Part VII
AI and your data
The frontier, built on everything before it.
- 21Is ChatGPT private?
- 22Your posts, their model
- 23When the machine decides, and when it fakes you
Part VIII
Your move
The whole course on one page.
- 24What you can actually do
Education, not legal advice. Where the course names a remedy, it also says who to ask when you need a real lawyer.
Who’s building this
Joel Pettigrew
Product leader · Juris Master, FSU College of Law
I’ve spent twenty years building data and AI products, and I went back to school for a Juris Master at Florida State, a law degree for non-lawyers, because I wanted to understand the rules around the stuff I build. The coursework is the starting point for this. The lessons are written fresh, checked against the actual statutes and cases, and dated, because this area of law moves every few months. It’s a Pettigrew Lab project, so it’s a family one.
Read my resumeBefore you ask
Fair questions
Is my phone actually listening to me?
Nobody has found evidence that it is, and researchers have looked hard. But that answer never satisfies anyone, so the course doesn’t stop there. Module 1 walks through how the ad found you without the microphone, and why that’s the more unsettling answer.
Is this legal advice?
No. It’s education. The course explains what the law says and what your options are, and it tells you plainly when a situation is one where you should talk to a real lawyer.
Which country’s laws does it cover?
Mostly the United States, including the state-by-state patchwork, with a full section on how Europe’s GDPR reaches American companies and what rights you can borrow from it. Where you live matters, and the course says so instead of pretending there’s one answer.
Won’t this be out of date in a year?
Parts of it, yes. Privacy law changed in at least six states in 2026 alone. Every lesson that depends on a moving law is dated and tagged for a yearly update, and the ideas underneath (contracts, harm, consent, who enforces what) don’t change much at all.
Do I need any background?
No. If you’ve clicked “accept cookies,” set up a TV or used a work laptop, you have all the background the first lesson needs.
What does it cost?
The outline is free and it’s on this page. When the app is out, the first part will be free and the rest a one-time unlock, the same as our other courses. No subscription, no ads, and no account, which would be a strange thing to require of a privacy course.
When can I get it?
It’s being written now. Email pettigrewlabllc@gmail.com and we’ll tell you the day it’s out.
Want to know the day it ships?
One email when the app is out, nothing else. If there’s a question you want the course to answer, put it in the email. The best modules so far came from questions like that.