The Big Lie Behind Big Tech’s Anti-Privacy Campaign

The unanimous vote in the House for the Massachusetts Consumer Data Privacy Act is a big deal.

The bill stops Big Tech from exploiting the personal information they gather about each of us every time we go online or open an app. It includes a complete ban on the sale of precise location data, which tech companies glean from our cell phones and are currently permitted to sell to anyone with a credit card. And it lets consumers sue Big Tech companies for violations.

These are strong, enforceable protections that would make Massachusetts a leader in digital privacy law.

But it’s not a done deal yet.

The bill now moves to conference committee, where legislators from the House and Senate will reconcile differences and unite around text to send the governor.

We can be certain that Big Tech will be lobbying furiously behind the scenes to weaken the bill—or kill it outright. It’s a playbook they’ve used time and again to defend the mammoth revenue streams they reap from our data.

The scary thing is, it often works. Here’s what’s behind it… and how to fight back.

Recognizing that they’re not trusted messengers, Big Tech sends its lobbyists to feed misleading information to nonprofits and small businesses to scare them into fighting against the bill.

This deceptive campaign is built around the premise that constant digital surveillance is essential to the health of modern economies. That is absolutely incorrect.

For decades, Big Tech has peddled the lie that the more they know about us, the better they can serve us. Meta isn’t satisfied with the information we share voluntarily on Facebook or Instagram. Google isn’t sated by the information they glean from our search activity.

Both those companies, and other pillars of Big Tech, want to continue to stalk us across apps and the internet, and even into the physical world, building enormous dossiers about our locations, our purchases, our friends, our interests, our health, our children, and even what our friends and family are doing, buying, and reading.

They claim that this system boosts the economy because businesses can pay Big Tech to mine these digital dossiers to find new customers through hyper-targeted marketing. They claim it benefits consumers because we see “personalized” ads that match our interests.

What they won’t say is that there’s another way to do advertising that delivers results for ad buyers without any privacy violations, or that surveillance advertising primarily serves the Big Tech companies that collectively make half a trillion dollars a year from it.

Big Tech’s vision of a surveillance-driven internet is deeply harmful to our democracy, our privacy, and our liberty. It has decimated our news industry, with catastrophic consequences for our democracy and free society. And a growing body of research shows how Big Tech’s insatiable appetite for our personal data exacerbates teen mental health challenges, political extremism, and the spread of dangerous misinformation online.

It has also spawned a shadow industry of data brokers, who sell our most sensitive data, including our precise geolocation information, to anyone with a credit card—including ICE agents and scammers.

None of this is good for us — and none of it is inevitable.

Surveillance advertising is just one way to run an internet company or a media website. Consumers don’t like it; they (quite rightly) find it creepy.

And while it remains astonishingly profitable for a handful of companies at the top of our digital food chain, surveillance-driven advertising is not necessarily more effective for ad buyers or publishers than traditional context-based advertising, which comes with none of the attendant risks to our privacy, security, or democracy.

Good privacy law will encourage a shift to more privacy-protective forms of advertising. One form of this is contextual ads, which are ads related to the content of the media around them — and which, crucially, do not depend on invasive data about the viewer. For example, a contextual ad for a pair of running shoes can be placed on a running magazine website or on a Google page displaying search results for a query related to Boston Marathon registration.

Surveillance-based advertising, by contrast, not only causes serious harm to our privacy and security—it also creates numerous problems for both businesses and publishers.

For one thing, consumers hate it. Unsurprisingly, recent research shows people recoil when they feel they are being tracked online. In studies involving 1,800 participants, surveillance-based ads nearly doubled consumers' feelings of being watched, triggering what researchers call "reactance," a psychological reaction that directly reduced willingness to buy a marketed product.

For publishers, there’s strong evidence that contextual ads perform better than surveillance-based ads. When Dutch public broadcaster NPO dropped third-party tracking and switched to contextual ads in 2020, its revenue jumped more than 60% year-over-year. The New York Times saw similar results in Europe after privacy law pushed it toward contextual targeting.

And for businesses, contextual ads attract customers at a lower cost. For example, a 2020 study run across live advertising campaigns for major brands like Sephora found the cost-per-click rate was 48% lower for contextual advertising than for surveillance advertising.

In other words, constant digital surveillance is not only bad for privacy and bad for our democracy—it also delivers poor results for businesses that are spending big money on these ad campaigns.

If the Big Tech surveillance advertising boondoggle fails consumer privacy, our democracy, our media, businesses, and consumers, who is it working for? Big Tech, of course.

In 2025 alone, Meta took in $200.97 billion in revenue—the vast majority coming from surveillance advertising sales. Google’s 2025 revenue was $402.8 billion, also mostly advertising dollars.

As the saying goes, if a digital service is free, you’re the product.

With so much money at stake, it’s no wonder Big Tech is working overtime to convince everyone that their way is the only way to keep the economy humming.

What Big Tech won't tell you is that privacy-preserving advertising delivers better returns — for everyone but them. Privacy-preserving advertising provides companies with a better bang for their marketing buck—and it also benefits publishers like newspapers that face existential threats in the age of generative AI.

Contextual advertising is just one form of privacy-preserving marketing available to businesses under the legislation passed by the House and Senate.

Those bills also allow companies that interact with consumers directly, like retailers or social media companies, to use the data they collect from us in the regular course of providing their services for targeted marketing. And with new rules in place, we’ll see innovation on new privacy-protective forms of advertising, as we have every time there’s new privacy technology or law that seeks to limit digital stalking.

Passing strong, enforceable privacy law to prevent companies like Google and Meta from tracking everything we do online will not solve all our nation’s problems overnight. But in an era when Big Tech is cozying up to authoritarians, hoarding wealth as ordinary people struggle to put food on the table, poisoning our information environment, and laying the groundwork for a dystopian surveillance society, 21st century data privacy law is an essential ingredient to getting our nation and our democracy back on track.

The good news is that doing so is not only good for our individual and collective freedoms—it's also good for business.

Kade Crockford is the director of technology and justice programs at the ACLU of Massachusetts.