Urge Your Members of Congress to Support the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act

Surveillance advertising – the core profit-driver for gatekeepers like Facebook and Google, as well as adtech middlemen – is the practice of extensively tracking and profiling individuals and groups, and then microtargeting ads at them based on their behavioral history, relationships, and identity. By incentivizing Big Tech monopolies to hook users for as long as possible with whatever content keeps them clicking and scrolling, surveillance advertising fuels the spread of disinformation, extremism, discrimination, and hate on and offline. Surveillance advertising has eroded our consensus reality and pushed democracy to the brink. 

The Banning Surveillance Advertising Act goes after this problem by banning the practice, which goes by various names (e.g., targeted, behavioral, programmatic, personalized ads) but is always premised on unseemly data collection and tracking to enable advertising. This pernicious practice is at the root of disinformation, discrimination, and privacy abuses. Now is our moment to end Big Tech's toxic business model of surveillance advertising. Urge your Members of Congress to support this legislation.