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People Power and Advancing Rights, Justice, and Democracy in the AI Age

By Nicole A. Ozer

You may not know what “surveillance capitalism” is—but when you use most internet websites or smartphone applications, you are caught in its web. Information about who you are, where you go, and what you do is being collected and used to power astronomical wealth concentration by companies and rampant government surveillance. The power of artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to further supercharge this alliance between company profits and government interests, adding to the heavy costs that surveillance capitalism business models already impose on rights, safety, health, economic opportunity, and democracy in the modern digital age. 

For more than two decades, we have increasingly relied on new technology to connect, communicate, work, and learn. Now that we live digital lives, we need to ensure that technology is working for us, not against us. We must build our collective power to fight for freedom, justice, and opportunity on the digital terrain. 

Whether technology helps or hinders struggles for fairness, rights, and justice depends on why it is built, who has access to it, and how it can be used. Ninety-six percent of US adults use the internet,1 most children use school-issued computers and have access to school email addresses,2 and 95 percent of teens have access to smartphones.3 By March of 2026, more than half of US teens had also used an AI chatbot for finding information and doing schoolwork.4 Most of us are aware of how ubiquitous technology has become, but many of us still don’t realize the true costs of many of these “free” services to our lives and livelihoods, or to the future of our country. 

Technology is being used by the government to invade our privacy, undermine our right to free expression, sway elections, suppress democracy, and fuel immigrant deportation and discriminatory policing.5 The corporate sector is rife with surveillance business models and biased algorithms that prioritize profit over people’s health and safety. When challenged, Big Tech and government often align as a well-funded surveillance lobby to preserve the privacy-violating practices that make a handful of companies hundreds of billions of dollars per year. This concentration of wealth and power and the corresponding lobbying influence is growing as AI amplifies surveillance capitalism’s reach. 

The path to our current digital reality began in the late 1970s when, at the dawn of the modern digital age, US policymakers largely failed to pass laws that matched the power of new technology.6 Our political leaders generally opted to rely on the efficacy of weak, procedural safeguards instead of creating robust rules of the road to protect people against government surveillance or limit how businesses could collect or use personal information. Some states, like California, have enacted stronger constitutional and statutory privacy protections.7 But federal laws restricting surveillance have remained woefully outdated, and consumer privacy laws have largely been locked for 50 years in a safeguards approach reliant on a notice-and-consent framework (including all those “I agree” buttons on the internet). As law professor Daniel Solove explains, the ability of this approach to protect people “is beyond broken; it is a complete fiction.”8 

We live in the aftermath of the failure of our elected leaders to enact baseline laws that actually protect people and society. The result has been unbridled surveillance capitalism: the widespread collection and monetization of our personal information for profit.9 As this article explains, if we are going to be in a position to make technology work for us, we must better understand what surveillance capitalism is, how we got here, what is truly at stake, and how we can build the power to make sure lawmakers take the action necessary to advance rights, justice, and opportunity in the AI age. 

A Brief Introduction to Surveillance Capitalism

Every day, billions of us go online to search, shop, or connect with others; each click creates a trail of personal information in the form of search and chat histories, location information, photos, and more. These digital footprints track our movements, habits, interests, and associations. The surveillance business models of most of the major technology companies are based on collecting and using vast amounts of our personal information, often in complex ways. Many of these companies then use these detailed digital footprints—dossiers about who we are, where we go, what we do, and who we know—to target lucrative online advertising and tailor online apps.10 Some tech companies also sell our personal information to additional third-party companies, often referred to as data brokers, who then package and further resell it.11 Once companies collect our information, it can also often be accessed by the government for surveillance.12 This vast information-sharing and -selling ecosystem has facilitated microtargeting that can be used to harm people, including financially vulnerable and marginalized groups.13 

How did we get here? Why has the modern technology that was promised to pave paths to greater opportunity and justice often ended up leading to more closed doors? 

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a growing movement for robust, substantive privacy protections that would support civil rights and prevent emerging technology from exacerbating and perpetuating government abuses and economic inequality. Civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; activists advocating for women’s, Indigenous, LGBTQIA+, and farm workers’ rights; and members of antiwar movements were targeted by new government surveillance technology, and many viscerally understood its power and the importance of a just vision of the future of technology.14 In his final public sermon before his assassination, King specifically highlighted the intersections of the “technological revolution with the impact of automation and cybernation” and the fight for human rights.15 Grassroots organizations like Computer People for Peace16 and larger organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union17 warned about threats of government surveillance and corporate information collection on personal lives, democracy, and society. By 1972, the Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Program also included an explicit provision about “people’s community control of modern technology.”18 

This support for stronger privacy rights saw an early great success with the passage, by state ballot measure, of the California constitutional right to privacy in 1972. At the core of the California constitutional right to privacy is an allocation of power to protect people against the combination of government, corporate, and technological power that could stack the deck against people’s rights. With its passage, California’s constitution became the first in the nation—either federal or state—to include an explicit right to privacy and protection against privacy intrusions that applied to both government and business actions.19

But further efforts were largely stymied by the mid-1970s, with passage of only some limited laws like the federal Privacy Act of 1974.20 This law was inadequate when it was enacted more than 50 years ago, and its “soft spots”21 and loopholes have become particularly salient today, with digital coups by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and other recent actions of the federal government.22 

What Went Wrong

Privacy law faced a fork in the road by the late 1970s. One path, championed by advocates for civil and workers’ rights, would have created a robust constitutional and human rights–based vision of privacy that limited how personal information could be collected and used by the government and private companies. The second path, promoted by business interests, relied largely on self-regulation or weak procedural safeguards, such as notice-and-consent frameworks, that do not legally prohibit what or how personal information can be collected or used. 

Then and continuing today, policymakers generally took the second path. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the federal privacy law that is supposed to limit government surveillance of electronic communications, has not been meaningfully updated since 1986,23 when cellphones were the size of bricks and the World Wide Web did not even exist.24 There was growing momentum in the late 1990s to update privacy laws for the internet age. But then the events of September 11, 2001, scared policymakers into believing that the government needed more extensive surveillance capacities. Existing protections were undermined by the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act,25 and political efforts to strengthen privacy laws for the modern digital age were derailed.26

On the consumer side, this second path has given rise to the default “I agree” and “I consent” buttons that are now rampant on the internet. Many federal- and state-level privacy laws put the burden on individuals to try to protect their privacy in this largely ineffective way rather than ensuring that there are substantive limitations on how our personal information is collected. 

Amid this inadequate privacy-law landscape, there have been some advances at the state level. In addition to the passage of the California constitutional right to privacy, other important state laws—like the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act—have filled gaps by requiring a warrant for a government entity to search devices or demand that technology companies turn over electronic communications information, including emails, text messages, AI prompts, and location information.* 

But the overall picture is that as technology has developed exponentially, the laws to protect people have remained in the digital dark ages. Civil rights leaders of the 1960s and 1970s viscerally understood the need to take action to ensure that the power of new technology worked for freedom and justice. But we have not been able to mobilize the social movement power necessary in recent decades to properly update privacy law for the digital age. And in that absence, surveillance capitalism was born and allowed to flourish. 

How Surveillance Capitalism Works

While the path to surveillance business models started in the 1970s, the current surveillance capitalism business model was not truly developed until the late 1990s. Leaders at dot-com companies like Google realized they could leverage advances in technology to extract, store, and process people’s personal information on an unprecedented scale and monetize it for targeted advertising. To accomplish this, the technology industry developed a four-step process: (1) lure people with “free” products and services to grow the user base as quickly as possible; (2) collect information about people as they used those “free” services; (3) monetize that information by selling targeted advertisements; and (4) profit richly.27

In the years that followed, many companies in Silicon Valley and beyond adopted and iterated this strategy.28 They continually refined how much personal information their services could harvest, how to encourage people to visit their websites more often and stay longer, and how partnerships across platforms could share more information and support more profit.29 

As professor Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, explains, “Surveillance capitalism now reorders every domain of economic activity.... Every product called ‘smart’ and every service called ‘personalized’ is part of this regime.”30 Or, in the words of professor Zeynep Tufekci: “We’re building this infrastructure of surveillance authoritarianism merely to get people to click on ads.”31 

The web of surveillance capitalism travels with you everywhere you go. Your smartphone is a surveillance device in your pocket, purse, or backpack, taking copious notes on where you go and what you do. When you use applications, everything from health tracking apps32 to a flashlight app,33 you are often paying a very high personal price because many apps make their money by selling personal information, like your location, to others in the mobile advertising ecosystem.34 This can also include the multibillion-dollar data broker industry, which collects vast amounts of personal information by scouring available sources to create detailed dossiers on almost every American adult.35 They have databases of people labeled with everything from “getting divorced” and “30-, 60-, 90-day mortgage lates” to “sexual orientation,” “erectile dysfunction,” “political affiliation,” “religion,” and far more.36 

If you find surveillance-powered ads ineffective, creepy, or invasive, you are not alone. Such online behavioral advertisements, which use our personal data to infer our interests, are unpopular; people consistently report that they do not like them.37 Empirical studies have also found that online behavioral ads often push products that are more expensive and are from lower-quality vendors.38 Sometimes the advertisements are predatory—like high-interest payday loans targeted to young people.39 In other cases, they are discriminatory, as when advertisers push information based on age, sex, race, ethnicity, or income level, resulting in certain groups receiving information about opportunities that others do not—such as potential jobs or housing opportunities.40 The Federal Trade Commission recommended in 2022 that people opt out of targeted advertising to protect themselves.41 But the current pervasiveness of online tracking and the operational challenges, including “dark patterns” used by companies to make opt-out choices more difficult,42 make it functionally impossible for many people to opt out entirely.

There is growing concern with how the profit incentives of surveillance capitalism lead to downstream impacts on young people’s physical and mental health.43 The growth of surveillance capitalism is also associated with harms to democracy itself—including the weakening of the free press,44 the spreading of misinformation and disinformation,45 and the influencing of elections.46 Over the past 20 years, there has been a period of steady decline in democratic freedoms globally and a growth in surveillance and repression.47 This trend coincides with the growth in surveillance capitalism and its profit incentives. Recent examples of intersections of surveillance capitalism infrastructure and the core of democracy include the actions of Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that harvested information from 50 million Facebook users for a campaign to influence the 2016 US presidential election,48 and another company that used AI combined with targeted advertising to mimic the voice of presidential candidates to try to mislead voters in the 2024 election.49

It is important to understand that the ecosystem created by the surveillance capitalism business model is also a treasure trove for government surveillance, with state agents exploiting it to sidestep the Fourth Amendment50 (which prohibits “unreasonable searches and seizures”51). Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the police, and federal intelligence agencies have trained their sights on the gargantuan stockpiles of personal information that technology companies have collected. Local and state law enforcement agencies have consistently taken advantage of outdated state and federal electronic privacy laws to access personal information collected about who people are, where they go, what they do, and who they know.52 

To get a sense of the scale and impact of these government surveillance demands in the United States, in the first six months of 2025 alone, Meta was asked to turn over user information associated with more than 149,000 accounts,53 and Google was asked to turn over user information associated with more than 120,000 accounts.54 (Consider how much personal information about you, your family members, and your friends is in a single Facebook or Google account.) Most technology companies receive government surveillance demands, but it is impossible to know the true extent of electronic surveillance in the United States because the outdated federal electronic privacy law does not require reporting by the government, and only some companies, including Meta and Google, actually publish government transparency reports. The US government also buys regular access to information amassed by the multibillion-dollar data broker industry.55 

New AI tools are pushing these surveillance powers to even greater extremes. AI companies are the new boom, with existing technology giants incorporating AI into their products and other AI companies rushing to harvest incalculable amounts of information on people, either scraped from online sources or collected from how people use their services. The CEO of Anthropic issued a public warning in February 2026 highlighting that information the government can currently purchase can be used by AI to “assemble … a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale.”56

With AI, History Is Repeating

As they did during debates about computerization in the 1970s, business interests today are recycling the same narratives about how AI can be used to benefit all of society while opposing any substantive regulation to ensure its power will actually be used to help people and not just enrich a few.57 Coupled with their ongoing anti-privacy blitz, companies are flooding our legislatures with lobbying money.58 Big Tech has already surpassed all prior lobbying records, including Big Oil and Big Tobacco, with Amazon and Meta often topping the lobbying lists.59 In the first nine months of 2025, the tech industry spent over $50 million on federal lobbying—and Meta alone had one lobbyist for every six members of Congress.60 The technology companies also lobby aggressively—and successfully—at the state level.61 Lobbying firms made $92 million for AI-related work in the first three quarters of 2025.62

On the federal level, these companies are working behind the scenes to try to pass a weak federal privacy law that could preempt and erase existing state privacy laws.63 Tech lobbyists also show up at state capitols across the country to help steer efforts to pass weak state laws64—and then return to DC to claim that federal preemption is even more necessary to address the growing “patchwork” of state laws.65 

When lobbying, companies are often using narratives66 from a well-worn playbook: (1) they argue that technology and technology companies are inherently good for the world; (2) they claim that anyone who challenges technology is a backward Luddite; (3) they present technology and any potential uses of it as inevitable;67 and (4) they describe technology as too complicated for nontech people to understand or regulate (a.k.a. the familiar “You’ll Break the Internet” argument68).

In the current political climate and with exponential advances in AI, there is no more urgent time to learn from the past. The good news is that this time around, we the people are more attuned to what is truly at stake. According to 2023 polls, 82 percent of US voters do not trust technology leaders to tackle regulation independently,69 and 77 percent of Americans “have little or no trust in leaders of social media companies to publicly admit mistakes and take responsibility for data misuse.”70 In 2025, a supermajority—69 percent—of the US public said that they do not think the government is doing enough to regulate AI.71 

Now is the time to work strategically on the local, state, national, and international levels to continue building the social movement necessary to put real power into privacy laws and make AI and other technologies work for the people.

How to Dismantle Surveillance Capitalism

If technology is going to work for the people, we cannot rely on weak procedural safeguards to protect us. Nor can we let technology be treated as an issue siloed from broader justice issues. Whether one works on labor rights, reproductive justice, education, racial justice, the climate crisis, immigrants’ rights, or any other issue, the ultimate success of these fights for justice depends on passing laws that protect and advance rights in the AI age. 

1. Protect Current Protections 

The first, most concrete step is to protect current protections. We must not allow the federal government to enact any federal AI or privacy law with preemption (a provision that stops states from enforcing current laws or passing new ones). Several bills have already been introduced at the federal level that would broadly preempt the efforts of state governments to protect people’s rights and safety. Preemption of state law is the holy grail for technology companies that want to erase current state laws and bottleneck any additional progress on regulating technology generally and new AI systems more specifically. 

Congress has historically given states room to enact stronger laws—and for good reason. Technology can advance quickly, and Congress often moves slowly. States serve a particularly critical function in areas of law as rapidly evolving as new technology. For example, the California constitutional right to privacy still has untapped potential and can be a crucial sword to combat corporate and government surveillance excesses.72 By barring continuing and efficient attention to the issue, preemption would freeze the current regime in place. The current presidential administration has been pushing for preemption through executive orders and other political pressure.73

Any federal AI or privacy law must be a floor, not a ceiling. States must be free to enforce existing laws and continue to enact new privacy laws that are stronger than any federal baseline. While many state leaders and a broad coalition of organizations are fighting back, more help is needed to stop federal preemption efforts in their tracks and to continue at the state level to address surveillance capitalism and protect people.74

2. Pass Robust Laws That Get to the Core of Surveillance Capitalism

The second step is to build power to support and pass robust, baseline consumer privacy laws that protect people in the AI age. Policymakers need to move beyond “wet napkin privacy laws”75 that rely on faulty notice and consent, placing “the burden of protection from commercial surveillance … mostly on us.”76 Instead, they need to pass new, substantive privacy laws that flat-out prohibit certain ways that information is collected and can be used. Passing these new laws is the best step to address the downstream effects of surveillance capitalism on our lives and health, rights, and democracy.77

3. Center the People in AI Decision-Making 

There must also be substantive laws that create robust rules for AI, not just weak process safeguards that do nothing to address power structures. It is critical that more diverse coalitions work together to enact laws that center people, not profit, in how AI is developed and used. Decision-making about AI systems used by both government and business must be grounded in fairness, accountability, evidence-based inquiry, and inclusive governance so that the power of AI can be wielded for the people.78 

AI use is growing in the private sector, and many government agencies have already deployed or are considering using AI in consequential decisions related to healthcare, housing, education, policing, finance, and other highly sensitive areas. While some policymakers have taken steps to implement decision-making mechanisms for certain AI systems, too many leaders simply accept corporate narratives about AI’s purported public benefit at face value. They are jumping to the “how” of AI implementation before thoroughly vetting potential systems or considering the “why” and “whether” to use AI systems at all. The people who are most impacted need an active role in decision-making, and some uses of AI need to be off the table completely. AI should never be trusted to make high-stakes decisions in our criminal, immigration, and policing systems, so one important place to start is prohibitions on its use for face and other biometric surveillance systems.

4. Engage in Surveillance Self-Defense 

We should all use available tools to protect ourselves and safeguard our personal information from collection and use. 

  • Use privacy-protective tools like Privacy Badger, an easy-to-use browser add-on that stops advertisers and trackers from secretly tracking where you go and what pages you look at on the web. Privacy Badger is developed and made available by the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation,79 which provides many other guides and no-cost resources to help you with surveillance self-defense.80 
  • Learn about state laws that you can use to protect your personal information. For example, if you live in California, take advantage of the California Consumer Privacy Act to learn what personal information companies have collected about you and to delete your information from company databases.81 Use the California Delete Act and the state’s new Delete Request and Opt-Out Platform as a one-stop shop to delete your information from data brokers and stop them from selling your information to others.82

The future of American democracy has become more and more imperiled since the rise of surveillance capitalism. Now, the rapid growth of AI is supercharging the power of government to pursue an anti-rights agenda. In the current political climate, the stakes are higher than ever to come together to enact the laws and policies that will make technology work for the people and allow us to advance rights, justice, freedom, and opportunity for all.                                                                                

Nicole A. Ozer is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Her previous positions include serving as the founding director of the Technology and Civil Liberties Program at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the inaugural executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. Affiliations are for identification purposes; this article reflects the views of the author.

*Full disclosure: I spearheaded the passage of this California law. (return to article)

Endnotes

1. Pew Research Center, “Internet, Broadband Fact Sheet,” November 20, 2025, pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/internet-broadband.

2. I. Bouchrika, “How Google Conquered the Classroom: The Googlification of Schools Worldwide for 2026,” Research.com, March 23, 2026, research.com/education/how-google-conquered-the-classroom.

3. M. Faverio and O. Sidoti, Teens, Social Media and AI Chatbots 2025 (Pew Research Center, December 9, 2025), pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/teens-and-internet-device-access-fact-sheet.

4. M. Faverio and E. Kikuchi, “Key Findings About How Americans View Artificial Intelligence,” Pew Research Center, March 12, 2026, pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findings-about-how-americans-view-artificial-intelligence.

5. M. Cagle, N. Ozer, and B. Hirsch, “Seeing Through Surveillance: Why Policymakers Should Look Past the Hype,” ACLU of Northern California, July 9, 2024, papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5009167.

6. N. Ozer, “Putting People Power into US Privacy Law: Learning from the Past to Light the Path to True Privacy Protection to Advance Rights and Democracy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” Carr-Ryan Center Discussion Paper, Harvard Kennedy School, Fall 2025, hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr-ryan/publications/putting-people-power-us-privacy-law-learning-past-light-path-true.

7. N. Ozer, “Golden State Sword: The History and Future of California’s Constitutional Right to Privacy to Defend and Promote Rights, Justice, and Democracy in the Modern Digital Age,” Berkeley Technology Law Journal 39, no. 3 (October 31, 2024), ssrn.com/abstract=5013707.

8. D. Solove, “Murky Consent: An Approach to the Fictions of Consent in Privacy Law,” 16th Annual BCLT Privacy Lecture: Murky Consent, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, September 22, 2023, law.berkeley.edu/research/bclt/bcltevents/16th-annual-bclt-privacy-lecture; see also D. Solove, “Murky Consent: An Approach to the Fictions of Consent in Privacy Law,” Boston University Law Review 104, no. 2 (2024): 593–639.

9. S. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (PublicAffairs, 2019).

10. Meta, “Privacy Policy,” facebook.com/privacy/policy/?entry_point=data_policy_redirect&entry=0; and Google, “Privacy Policy: Why Google Collects Data,” policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en#whycollect.

11. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, “What Are Data Brokers?,” go.aft.org/1np.

12. Google, “Global Requests for User Information,” go.aft.org/pcz.

13. J. Snow, “Big Tech Is Trying to Burn Privacy to the Ground—and They’re Using Big Tobacco’s Strategy to Do It,” Tech Policy Press, October 9, 2024, techpolicy.press/big-tech-is-trying-to-burn-privacy-to-the-ground-and-theyre-using-big-tobaccos-strategy-to-do-it.

14. Ozer, “Putting People Power.”

15. M. King, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” sermon at the National Cathedral, Washington, DC, March 31, 1968, seemeonline.com/history/mlk-jr-awake.htm.

16. S. Jayaraj, “A Brief History from Hack Manhattan—an Ode to the 1970’s Computer People for Peace,” Medium (blog), December 31, 2022, medium.com/@shwethajayaraj/a-brief-history-from-hack-manhattan-an-ode-to-the-1970s-computer-people-for-peace-fe04623d5d21.

17. G. Reggio, “Public Service Messages from the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union (Godfrey Reggio),” New Mexico Civil Liberties Union, YouTube, February 20, 2013, youtube.com/watch?v=yah54al6Cks.

18. Black Panther Party Alumni Legacy Network, “The Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Program 1972,” bppaln.org/10-point-platform.

19. Ozer, “Golden State Sword.”

20. Ozer, “Putting People Power.”

21. Office of Lori Trahan, “Press Releases: Trahan Announces Effort to Reform Privacy Act of 1974, Protect Americans’ Data from Government Abuse,” March 18, 2025, trahan.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=3491.

22. N. Ozer, “Will We Let a Digital Coup Against Democracy Prevail?,” The Contrarian (blog), February 25, 2025, contrarian.substack.com/p/will-we-let-a-digital-coup-against.

23. S. Pell and R. Salgado, “It’s Time for Congress to Update a 40-Year-Old Surveillance Law,” Brookings, April 24, 2026, brookings.edu/articles/its-time-for-congress-to-update-a-40-year-old-surveillance-law.

24. D. McCullagh, “Google, Facebook Go Retro in Push to Update 1986 Privacy Law,” CNET, October 21, 2011, cnet.com/news/privacy/google-facebook-go-retro-in-push-to-update-1986-privacy-law.

25. American Civil Liberties Union, “Surveillance Under the USA/Patriot Act,” October 23, 2001, aclu.org/documents/surveillance-under-usapatriot-act.

26. D. McCullagh, “How 9/11 Attacks Reshaped U.S. Privacy Debate,” CNET, September 9, 2011, www.cnet.com/news/privacy/how-911-attacks-reshaped-u-s-privacy-debate.

27. N. Maréchal, “Targeted Advertising Is Ruining the Internet and Breaking the World,” Vice, November 16, 2018, vice.com/en/article/targeted-advertising-is-ruining-the-internet-and-breaking-the-world.

28. S. Zuboff, “Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Death Match of Institutional Orders and the Politics of Knowledge in Our Information Civilization,” Organization Theory 3, no. 3 (November 21, 2022); and Maréchal, “Targeted Advertising.”

29. Third-party plug-ins like the Facebook “Like” button also collected information for Facebook: The Week, “Is Facebook’s ‘Like’ Button Spying on You?,” January 8, 2015, theweek.com/articles/484539/facebooks-like-button-spying. The Meta Pixel also sends information to the company: S. Witley, “Meta Pixel’s Video Tracking Spurs Wave of Data Privacy Suits,” Bloomberg Law, October 13, 2022, news.bloomberglaw.com/privacy-and-data-security/meta-pixels-video-tracking-spurs-wave-of-consumer-privacy-suits.

30. S. Zuboff, “Democracy Can Still End Big Tech’s Dominance Over Our Lives,” Time, May 5, 2022, time.com/6173639/democracy-big-techs-dominance-shoshana-zuboff.

31. Z. Tufekci, “We’re Building a Dystopia Just to Make People Click on Ads,” TEDGlobal, September 2017, ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads; and Maréchal, “Targeted Advertising.”

32. ACLU California, “Case Study: Sell Data and Say You Didn’t: How Flo Health Got in Trouble with the FTC,” itsgoodfor.biz/case-study/sell-data-and-say-you-didn%E2%80%99t-how-flo-health-got-trouble-ftc; and ACLU California, “Case Study: Premom Broke Privacy Promises in a Post-Roe World,” itsgoodfor.biz/case-study/premom-broke-privacy-promises-post-roe-world.

33. ACLU California, “Case Study: Shady Flashlight App Keeps Millions of Users in the Dark,” itsgoodfor.biz/case-study/shady-flashlight-app-keeps-millions-users-dark.

34. Good Research, “Short Overview of Data Ecosystem and Data Flows: CalPrivacy Info Session,” California Privacy Protection Agency, April 30, 2026, cppa.ca.gov/meetings/materials/20260430_0501_good_and_chen.pdf.

35. N. Ozer and M. Cagle, Losing the Spotlight: A Study of California’s Shine the Light Law (ACLU of California, November 2013), aclunc.org/sites/default/files/Losing%20the%20Spotlight%20-%20A%20Study%20of%20California%27s%20Shine%20the%20Light%20Law%20final.pdf; and GlobeNewswire, “Data Brokers Market Estimated to Reach US$ 462.4 Billion by 2031, TMR Report,” August 1, 2022, globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/08/01/2489563/0/en/Data-Brokers-Market-Estimated-to-Reach-US-462-4-billion-by-2031-TMR-Report.html.

36. P. Dixon, “Testimony of Pam Dixon, Executive Director, World Privacy Forum: Data Brokers—Is Consumers’ Information Secure?,” US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, November 3, 2015, judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/11-3-15%20Dixon%20Testimony.pdf.

37. R. Heimlich, “Internet Users Don’t Like Targeted Ads,” Pew Research Center, March 13, 2012, pewresearch.org/short-reads/2012/03/13/internet-users-dont-like-targeted-ads; and B. Chen, “Are Targeted Ads Stalking You? Here’s How to Make Them Stop,” New York Times, August 15, 2018, nytimes.com/2018/08/15/technology/personaltech/stop-targeted-stalker-ads.html.

38. V. Marotta et al., “The Welfare Impact of Targeted Advertising Technologies,” Information Systems Research 33, no. 1 (November 15, 2021): iii–vii, 1–398; J. Angwin, “If It’s Advertised to You Online, You Probably Shouldn’t Buy It. Here’s Why,” New York Times, April 6, 2023, nytimes.com/2023/04/06/opinion/online-advertising-privacy-data-surveillance-consumer-quality.html; E. Mustri, I. Adjerid, and A. Acquisti, “Behavioral Advertising and Consumer Welfare: An Empirical Investigation,” SSRN, perma.cc/VJ3A-DKYP; and C. Silverman and R. Mac, “‘Facebook Gets Paid,’” BuzzFeed News, December 10, 2020, buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-ad-scams-revenue-china-tiktok-vietnam.

39. S. Flores and N. Kjeldgaard, “Payday Loan Ads on Social Media Targeting New, Young Audience,” NBC 7 San Diego, June 16, 2022, nbcsandiego.com/news/investigations/nbc-7-responds/payday-loan-ads-on-social-media-targeting-new-young-audience/2972920.

40. J. Rugh and D. Massey, “Racial Segregation and the American Foreclosure Crisis,” American Sociological Review 75, no. 5 (October 2010): 629–30; see also New York Times, “Fair Lending and Accountability,” September 7, 2011, nytimes.com/2011/09/08/opinion/fair-lending-and-accountability.html; and L. Morris and O. Akselrod, “Holding Facebook Accountable for Digital Redlining,” ACLU, January 27, 2022, aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/holding-facebook-accountable-for-digital-redlining.

41. E. Fletcher, “Social Media a Gold Mine for Scammers in 2021,” Federal Trade Commission, January 25, 2022, perma.cc/GHU2-2DRG.

42. H. Habib and L. Cranor, “It’s Shockingly Difficult to Escape the Web’s Most Pervasive Dark Patterns,” Fast Company, November 4, 2019, fastcompany.com/90425350/its-shockingly-difficult-to-escape-the-webs-most-pervasive-dark-patterns; and H. Habib et al., “An Empirical Analysis of Data Deletion and Opt-Out Choices on 150 Websites,” ACM Digital Library, 2019, dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.5555/3361476.3361505.

43. S. Gamble and N. Ozer, “Building Coalitions for Strategic Interventions to Improve Adolescent Health in the Technology Age,” Adolescent Health 76, no. 3 (March 2025): P343–345; and C. McSherry et al., “Privacy First: A Better Way to Address Online Harms,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, November 14, 2023, eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms.

44. McSherry et al., “Privacy First.”

45. Brennan Center for Justice, “Election Misinformation,” brennancenter.org/election-misinformation; and B. Schippers, “Online Disinformation, Microtargeting, and Freedom of Expression,” in Human Rights in the Digital Domain: Core Questions, ed. T. Pajuste (Cambridge University Press, October 2025), cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/B1B8428E21B024C773BFBDCCCBDF0008/9781009606240c15_308-332.pdf/online_disinformation_microtargeting_and_freedom_of_expression.pdf.

46. Zuboff, “Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy?”

47. Freedom House, “New Report: Global Freedom Declined for 20th Consecutive Year in 2025,” March 19, 2026, freedomhouse.org/article/new-report-global-freedom-declined-20th-consecutive-year-2025; and Y. Gorokhovskaia, C. Grothe, and A. Slipowitz, Freedom in the World 2026: The Growing Shadow of Autocracy (Freedom House, 2026), freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2026/growing-shadow-autocracy.

48. N. Ozer and C. Conley, “After the Facebook Privacy Debacle, It’s Time for Clear Steps to Protect Users,” ACLU, March 23, 2018, aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/after-facebook-privacy-debacle-its-time-clear-steps-protect; and ACLU California, “Case Study: Cambridge Apocalyptica: Facebook’s Platform-App Privacy Disaster,” https://www.itsgoodfor.biz/case-study/cambridge-apocalyptica-facebook%E2%80%99s-platform-app-privacy-disaster.

49. Associated Press, “Company That Sent Fake Biden Robocalls in New Hampshire Agrees to $1M Fine,” The Guardian, August 22, 2024, theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/22/fake-biden-robocalls-fine-lingo-telecom.

50. M. Guariglia, “Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act Passed the House, Now It Should Pass the Senate,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, April 18, 2024, eff.org/deeplinks/2024/04/fourth-amendment-not-sale-act-passed-house-now-it-should-pass-senate.

51. Constitution Annotated, “Constitution of the United States: Fourth Amendment,” US Congress, constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-4.

52. N. Ozer, “Putting Online Privacy Above the Fold: Building a Social Movement and Creating Corporate Change,” New York University Review of Law & Social Change 36 (2012): 215–81.

53. Meta, “United States of America,” transparency.meta.com/reports/government-data-requests/country/US.

54. Google, “Global Requests.”

55. J. Joffe-Block, “Your Data Is Everywhere. The Government Is Buying It Without a Warrant,” National Public Radio, March 25, 2026, npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillance-data-brokers-congress-anthropic.

56. Anthropic, “Statement from Dario Amodei on Our Discussions with the Department of War,” February 26, 2026, anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war. 

57. US Chamber of Commerce, “U.S. Chamber Releases Artificial Intelligence Principles,” September 23, 2019, uschamber.com/regulations/us-chamber-releases-artificial-intelligence-principles.

58. Carlton Fields, 2023 Carlton Fields Class Action Survey: Best Practices in Reducing Cost and Managing Risk in Class Action Litigation (2023), 9, carltonfields.com/Libraries/CarltonFields/Documents/Class%20Action%20Survey/2023-carlton-fields-class-action-survey.pdf; T. Feathers and A. Ng, “Tech Industry Groups Are Watering Down Attempts at Privacy Regulation, One State at a Time,” The Markup, May 26, 2022, themarkup.org/privacy/2022/05/26/tech-industry-groups-are-watering-down-attempts-at-privacy-regulation-one-state-at-a-time; and A. Minkin, “As Big Tech Gears Up for the 2026 Midterms, Its Lobbying Operations Continue Unabated,” Issue One, October 21, 2025, issueone.org/articles/big-tech-lobbying-2025-q3.

59. J. Chung, Big Tech, Big Cash: Washington’s New Power Players (Public Citizen, March 24, 2021), citizen.org/article/big-tech-lobbying-update.

60. Minkin, “As Big Tech Gears Up.”

61. B. Bordelon and A. Ng, “Tech Lobbyists Are Running the Table on State Privacy Laws,” Politico, August 16, 2023, politico.com/news/2023/08/16/tech-lobbyists-state-privacy-laws-00111363.

62. J. Barth, “AI’s $130M Lobbying Blitz Hands HR the Real AI Compliance Burden,” HR Executive, March 26, 2026, hrexecutive.com/ais-130m-lobbying-blitz-hands-hr-the-real-ai-compliance-burden.

63. Office of Governor Gavin Newsom, “Governor Newsom, Attorney General Bonta and CPPA File Letter Opposing Federal Privacy Preemption,” February 28, 2023, gov.ca.gov/2023/02/28/governor-newsom-attorney-general-bonta-and-cppa-file-letter-opposing-federal-privacy-preemption.

64. Feathers and Ng, “Tech Industry Groups.”

65. J. Snow, “Big Tech Is Trying to Burn Privacy to the Ground—and They’re Using Big Tobacco’s Strategy to Do It,” Tech Policy Press, October 9, 2024, techpolicy.press/big-tech-is-trying-to-burn-privacy-to-the-ground-and-theyre-using-big-tobaccos-strategy-to-do-it; and GovFacts, “Big Tech Has Spent More Than $1 Billion to Stop States from Regulating AI,” December 15, 2025, govfacts.org/accountability-ethics/lobbying/big-tech-has-spent-more-than-1-billion-to-stop-states-from-regulating-ai.

66. Ozer, “Putting People Power.”

67. BBC, “The Myth of Inevitability,” produced by A. Armstrong, October 11, 2019, bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0009522.

68. Ozer, “Putting People Power.”

69. R. Heath, “Exclusive Poll: Americans Distrust AI Giants,” Axios, August 9, 2023, axios.com/2023/08/09/ai-voters-trust-government-regulation.

70. C. McClain et al., How Americans View Data Privacy (Pew Research Center, October 18, 2023), pewresearch.org/internet/2023/10/18/how-americans-view-data-privacy.

71. Quinnipiac Poll, “The Age of Artificial Intelligence,” April 16, 2025, poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3923.

72. N. Ozer, “It’s Time to Revitalize California’s Constitutional Right to Privacy,” State Court Report, August 11, 2025, statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/its-time-revitalize-californias-constitutional-right-privacy.

73. T. Wolverton, “Legal Experts: Trump AI Order Mostly ‘Political Theater,’” San Francisco Examiner, December 13, 2025, sfexaminer.com/news/technology/trump-ai-executive-order-what-it-means/article_0751df65-06d6-4a9c-81df-3c94d124ab7e.html; and California Privacy Protection Agency, “California Privacy Protection Agency Releases Letter Opposing the SECURE Data Act,” State of California, April 27, 2026, privacy.ca.gov/2026/04/california-privacy-protection-agency-releases-letter-opposing-the-secure-data-act.

74. California Privacy Protection Agency, “California Privacy Protection Agency Releases Letter.”

75. N. Richards and W. Hartzog, “The Vermont Veto Is a Step Backward for Privacy,” IAPP, June 18, 2024, iapp.org/news/a/the-vermont-veto-is-a-step-backward-for-privacy.

76. J. Turow et al., Americans Can’t Consent to Companies’ Use of Their Data: They Admit They Don’t Understand It, Say They’re Helpless to Control It, and Believe They’re Harmed When Firms Use Their Data—Making What Companies Do Illegitimate (Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, February 2023), papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4391134&__cf_chl_f_tk=_dPz5SrZnwMiMhqHMh5qu9qzfyhrJlCRbiQrWgyErH8-1783454808-1.0.1.1-PCIgiNufS1yNuc4JIpm6i8n_F_jyXReapoTBiWH45rA. 

77. McSherry et al., “Privacy First.”

78. N. Ozer and B. Hirsch, “How State Leaders Can Put People First in AI Decision-Making,” Federation of American Scientists, June 11, 2026, fas.org/publication/put-people-first-in-ai-decision-making.

79. Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Privacy Badger,” eff.org/pages/privacy-badger.

80. Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Surveillance Self-Defense: Tips, Tools, and How-Tos for Safer Online Communications,” ssd.eff.org.

81. Office of the Attorney General, “California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA),” State of California Department of Justice, March 13, 2024, oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa.

82. California Privacy Protection Agency, “Delete Request and Opt-Out Platform (DROP),” State of California, privacy.ca.gov/drop.

[Illustrations by Lincoln Agnew]

American Educator, Fall 2026