Louis Rossmann
Right-to-Repair Activist & YouTuber
Repair-shop owner turned consumer-rights YouTuber who launched the viral 2025 “change your profile picture to Clippy” protest against big tech — including companies mining user data to train AI — and blocks AI crawlers from his Consumer Rights Wiki.
In his words
When a company CEO logs into their Slack and sees 10,000 Clippys looking back at them, what I hope occurs is that they intuitively understand that they no longer live in a world where they can get away with f*cking over the consumer.
If you told Clippy that you were having a bad day, he wasn’t going to use that information to try and figure out which advertiser to sell you to, nor was he trying to steal your personal data… He had no ulterior motives. He was simply there to help.
Biography
Louis Rossmann (born 1988) is a New York City electronics technician who built Rossmann Repair Group into a MacBook logic-board repair institution — and built a YouTube channel of more than 2.6 million subscribers into one of the loudest voices for the right to repair. He has testified before state legislatures across the country, founded the Repair Preservation Group, and in 2025 co-founded the FULU Foundation (“Freedom from Unethical Limitations on Users”) to fight for digital ownership rights.
Clippy versus the data miners
On August 7, 2025, Rossmann uploaded “Change your profile picture to clippy. I’m serious” — a call to adopt Microsoft’s obsolete Office assistant as a protest icon against tech companies selling personal data, remotely disabling products, and mining user data to train AI programs. The video drew roughly 2.3 million views and 39,000 comments within five days, and Clippy avatars spread across YouTube, X, and Reddit. His argument was pointed nostalgia: Clippy was annoying, but he never tracked you, profiled you, or fed your words into a training corpus.
Clippy is a symbol that what used to be considered one of the worst annoyances of our life would now not only be welcomed, but for all of his flaws, celebrated as an idol.
Rossmann’s objection is less to AI as a technology than to how it is fed. His Consumer Rights Wiki, launched in January 2025 to document anti-consumer practices, was configured from the start to block AI crawlers so its volunteer-written content could not be scraped for training. The stance fits his broader career: he is not a machine-learning critic in the mold of Gary Marcus, but a property-rights absolutist who sees non-consensual data harvesting as the newest form of the post-sale bait-and-switch he has fought for a decade.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/louis-rossmann