Each time a person logs onto a computer or takes their cell phone with them, not only are the things they searched tracked, but also where and when they do so. Bothell resident Jason Gaylord believes people live in a decreasingly private world, though they are increasingly connected through the internet.

In protest, he is in the midst of a 31-day vigil, July 4 to Aug. 4, to protest consumer data trafficking, sitting on top of Bothell Chiropractic Building on Bothell’s Main Street.

“I was an original Web 1.0 entrepreneur. As I looked at Web 2.0, if we can’t make money by selling advertising, how are we going to make money,” said Gaylord, Founder of StopConsumerTrafficking.com and LocalLoop. “The idea was ‘let’s start commoditizing people’s identities, let’s take behavioral tracking to another level. Let’s take search habits and tracking to another level.’”

Each person who uses any part of the internet has an avatar representation of what they like, what they do for hobbies or work, or even where they live and play.

“They found a way to silently track everything that we do, everything that we search for, all of our friends and what they do, the things we are talking about at any given time” Gaylord said. “They then match those things with our cell phone records and credit card records and create these affinity profiles, that I like to refer to as avatars, for each of us.”

According to Gaylord, Facebook has the ability to recognize a person with more than 90-percent accuracy sans-photograph, based off a person’s information. Corporations often sell user ‘Avatar’ information in order to offer services for free, or so they say.

“If I have a neighbor and that neighbor builds a fence five-feet onto my property line and I just let it slide, at some point that property becomes his,” Gaylord said. “The most-valuable asset I own is my unique, individual identity; it’s the only unique thing that I own and the only thing that is truly mine.”

Instead of property lines, every person on the planet is the product, but also the victim, Gaylord said.

“It’s amazing what’s happening,” Gaylord said. “It’s a wonder people don’t talk about these things.”

Gaylord’s goal is to create an online environment where users and their personal identity are respected, instead of used for capitalistic greed.

His newly launched social media and search engine, Local Loop or www.localloop.com, aims to give people control over their personal information on their site.

If, for some reason, a person didn’t want to be on LocalLoop anymore, they could ‘Nuke’ their own personal information on the site’s servers.

All of it.

“’Minority Report,’ you watch that movie and it seems like sci-fi [and] and so 1984,” Gaylord said.

After the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, teams of law enforcement raided more than one family’s home after multiple people searched for ‘suspicious items.’ One Long Island, NY, family was raided after the professional writer and Quinoa-loving mother searched for pressure cookers, the husband searched for a backpack and her son searched for public events.

“In the online world, in the regular desktop world, they’ve tracked us with cookies. Those cookies have allowed them to penetrate our lives in incredible ways,” Gaylord said. “Today, we have mobile phones that track every move that we make. They’re literally tracking beacons.”

Gaylord wants to protect netizens identities and information, whether people’s data is used by corporations to market products to people or used by the government to track and pre-cognition crimes that have yet to be committed.

And, if the global protests in support of net neutrality is any indication, people in every walk of life want more rights as internet users. The release of information made available by Edward Snowden showed how the government, using projects such as the clandestine PRISM surveillance program, has been taking advantage of user data on sites such as Facebook, Google and more.

“It’s what America was founded on, is the freedom of press and our ability not to be bought and have a voice against these kinds of [tyrants],” Gaylord said. “Its insidious and it has to stop. When is someone going to draw a line in the sand and say that people matter?”

For Gaylord, the loneliness he feels up on the roof of a building is worth spreading his message of corporate, and governmental, intrusion to the masses.

“I hope to God, I mean this with every fiber of my being, I hope that by me spending a month of my life… serves as a wakeup call to other people that our unique individual selves matter,” Gaylord said. “The desire that I get from this is that we can use it in a way to spur a conversation and hopefully get a groundswell of momentum for change.”

However, it’ll be another 18 days until he will get to hold his friends and family on the ground. For now, it’s all about spreading awareness and protesting in support of netizen rights.

“It’s a travesty what is happening to the voice of America and, I assure you, that consumer traffickers of the world want nothing more than to silence the voices as much as they can,” Gaylord said. “I think people are willing to make a choice if they are given the facts.”