Friend,

Almost all of us use digital platforms and services that gather our information, including details about our identities, our locations and our browsing and search histories. In fact, it's nearly impossible to be online without surrendering control over our data. And these companies are tracking and selling our information for one basic reason: They can make money from it. A lot of it.

And we get it — knowing this is the case and doing something about it can feel really overwhelming. It feels like the choices are either to just accept that Big Tech owns all your data now or to get offline completely and erase your existence from the digital world to regain a shred of privacy.

But here’s the big secret … it doesn’t have to be like this. We can push federal regulators and Congress to prohibit companies from buying and selling our data.

Think that’s impossible? It’s not — it’s already happening in other countries and can happen in the United States too — if we can keep up the pressure and demand real accountability.

When we give up our data to access online services, it can feel harmless. Sometimes we don’t even know when we’re doing this. But don’t just “accept” those cookies. Companies collect and store our data, often using it to tailor our experiences and the content we see and don't see. This can lead to online discrimination, when companies use our data to exclude specific users from the same information and opportunities as others.

And it's not just private companies or social-media platforms that have access to our data. Government agencies are also buying our personal information from private data brokers. This creates an added layer of surveillance that should worry all of us.

Companies won't simply stop collecting or selling our data because it’s the right thing to do. And governments will try to find workarounds to the constitutional requirements that they get a warrant before surveilling us with intrusive technologies.

That is why we need strong, meaningful federal reforms to put control of our data back in our hands.

And that's why Free Press Action and thousands of our supporters are standing together to tell private companies and government agencies to keep their hands off our data.

Our best way out of this mess is to push for strong privacy legislation. We’re fighting for safeguards that will close the loopholes that currently enable our government to buy our data. And we’re advocating for strict limits on what information companies can collect while bolstering consumer control over their own data.

Thanks for reading, and for being with us in this fight,

Nora Benavidez
Senior Counsel and Director of Digital Justice and Civil Rights
Free Press Action
freepress.net

P.S. Data privacy is important. It’s critical to staying safe online, to keeping unwanted companies and governments out of our bedrooms, our personal decisions, our personal lives. And this is a fight we’re not going to back down from until we see real change. If you’re with us, and if you want to help us give everything we’ve got to securing real data-privacy protections in the United States — I hope you’ll consider making a gift to support our work. We need your voice, we need your generosity and we need your outrage to get this done.