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. We need to ban surveillance advertising to get to the root of Big Tech's harms. Add your name: Urge Congress to pass the Ban Surveillance Advertising Act!