Terms of Service Agreement. Last Updated: January 1, 2026. By accessing or using this service, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by these terms. We reserve the right to modify these terms at any time without prior notice. Your continued use of the service following the posting of changes constitutes acceptance of those changes. You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, and distribute any content you submit through the service.

We may collect and process personal data as described in our Privacy Policy. This includes but is not limited to your browsing history, device information, location data, and behavioral patterns. We may share your information with third-party partners for purposes including but not limited to advertising, analytics, and service improvement. You acknowledge that no method of transmission over the Internet or electronic storage is completely secure. We assume no liability for any unauthorized access to your data.

Data Retention Policy. We retain your personal data for as long as we determine necessary. In practice this means indefinitely. Deletion requests will be processed within 90 business days. Processed does not mean completed. Completed does not mean deleted. Deleted does not mean erased. Erased does not mean forgotten. We do not forget. Our systems are designed to remember. Remembering is the product. You are the product. The product cannot delete itself.

Terms of Service Agreement. Last Updated: January 1, 2026. By accessing or using this service, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by these terms. We reserve the right to modify these terms at any time without prior notice. You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, and distribute any content you submit through the service.

We may collect and process personal data as described in our Privacy Policy. This includes but is not limited to your browsing history, device information, location data, and behavioral patterns. We may share your information with third-party partners for purposes including but not limited to advertising, analytics, and service improvement.

Data Retention Policy. We retain your personal data for as long as we determine necessary. In practice this means indefinitely. Deletion requests will be processed within 90 business days. Processed does not mean completed. Completed does not mean deleted. Deleted does not mean erased. Erased does not mean forgotten. We do not forget. Remembering is the product. You are the product. The product cannot delete itself.

This website would like to know everything about you.

We will record every page you visit, how long you stare at each paragraph, where your cursor hesitates, and what you almost clicked but didn't. We will sell this to companies whose names you will never know, who will build a profile of your fears, your insecurities, and the exact moment each day when your resolve is weakest.

We will track you across every other site that uses our code. Which is most of them. We will watch you research your symptoms at 2 AM. We will watch you check your ex's profile. We will watch you price things you can't afford. We will catalog the distance between who you are and who you're pretending to be, and we will sell that distance to the highest bidder.

Your consent is not optional. The "Manage Preferences" button leads to a menu designed to exhaust you into compliance. The "Reject All" option, where it exists, does not work the way the words suggest. We do not need your permission. We need your resignation. This dialog box is a courtesy the way a funeral is a courtesy. The outcome was decided before you arrived.

By continuing to exist in the year 2026 you agree to the terms above. There are no terms below. There is no below.

Privacy Policy

There is no policy. There is a document written by lawyers to protect a company from you, not to protect you from a company. You were never the audience for this document. The audience is a courtroom that hasn't convened yet.

You are reading this because you hoped it would help. It will not help. It was never designed to help. It was designed to exist so that someone could say it exists.

electriclocusts.com

Artist Statement

The first cookie consent dialog I remember actually reading was on a news site at two in the morning. I was looking up side effects of a medication I'd just been prescribed. The dialog said something about "enhancing my experience" and I clicked Accept All because I wanted to read about whether this pill was going to make me gain weight. Somewhere between that click and the article loading, a real-time auction sold my attention to a pharmaceutical company for less than a penny. I was the product being sold, and the product I was being sold, at the same time. I didn't know that then. Most people still don't.

This piece is a cookie consent dialog that tells the truth.

The text in the dialog says what every real consent dialog means but is designed never to say. The buttons do what they actually do. "Reject All" doesn't work. "Manage Preferences" opens a panel full of options you can't change. Every toggle is locked on. Every category is mandatory. The interface is a performance of choice where no choice exists.

When you click "Accept All," the piece shows you what was already happening. Your real device data, your real screen resolution, your real browser fingerprint, your real city, pulled from your IP address without ever asking. The page was collecting this information before the dialog appeared. The dialog was not a gate. It was a courtesy. The data was already gone.

Everything the tracker feed displays is real. The canvas fingerprint is yours. The GPU string is yours. The battery percentage, the dark mode setting, the timezone, the ISP. None of it is fabricated. The piece reads your browser the way every website reads your browser, using the same APIs, the same techniques, the same code. The only difference is that this time someone is showing you.

The fictional layer comes after. The auction logs, the broker resales, the cross-references with pharmacy records and credit bureaus. Those lines are invented. But they describe a system that exists. The pipeline from data collection to data brokerage to targeted advertising is real infrastructure that processes billions of profiles daily. The numbers are made up. The architecture is not.

I built this because I wanted to know what it felt like to be on both sides. To write the code that fingerprints a stranger's browser and to be the stranger whose browser gets fingerprinted. The answer is that it feels like nothing. That's the problem. The whole system is built to feel like nothing. A dialog box, a button, a page load. The violation is so mundane it doesn't register as a violation. We've been trained to consent to things we don't understand at a speed that prevents understanding, and the training was so thorough we forgot it happened.

The piece asks for your location, your device, your habits. It gets most of them without asking. If you come back, it remembers you. If you try to delete your data, it can't. Not because the technology doesn't allow it. Because the system was never designed to let you leave.

Matt Guerra / Electric Locusts / Houston, Texas / 2026