When Transdiem became the newest big-tech social media company and caught managed to base its privacy policy directly on its users' souls, most people were thrilled by the convenience of having perfect online security. Sure, a few people had to buy the rights to their own souls by making deals with Transdiem, but most people never had to worry about identity theft ever again. There wasn't much need to remember hundreds of passwords, link every account to an easily lost mobile phone, or invest in biometric security features when any Chronivac-enabled device could electronically scan your aura and instantly detect your entirely unique spiritual energy wavelength. Instead of logging into every website with an email or phone number, people logged in with their Chronivac soul accounts.
Naturally, of course, this new system of online security did not satisfy everyone. Some people, especially the more religious and spiritual types, were profoundly skeptical of handing over their soul data to a globalized megacorp. Some of them were extremely conservative and some were extremely liberal, but what they all had in common was that they didn't want their souls scanned by Transdiem or anyone else. The media called them the "spiritually anonymous" or the "unaccounted". When they had to be vilified in a government report or a news story, they were called "spiritual anonymity extremists" or "SAEs". Regular people on online forums usually either called them "Hessites" or slurred them as "vonnies". These two more popular names were references to Yvonne Hess, a Neo-Pagan artist who wrote a famous pro-anonymity poem called "The Unmeasured Soul."
What the unaccounted called themselves was "free-soulers". They founded strictly isolated compounds in deep forests or remote deserts to try to get away from all Internet-connected technology. Some of them were okay with 20th-century level technology, and some of them lived more like the 1600s. They more or less fed themselves by living off the land to avoid accidentally getting scanned by someone living at the grocery store. Occasionally there were reports of Hessites coming back into society because a sudden famine had driven them out of their mountain compounds or their underwater biospheres. Not everyone who came back was forced out by dire circumstances, however. Some of these spiritual anonymity groups were willing to send out evangelists to recruit people for the cause, often with the understanding that the evangelists might not be able to avoid getting their souls scanned, because they thought it was necessary for the greater good.