Friend,

Have you encountered an ad for a product or service on Instagram recently that just … felt a little too personal? Or maybe you're being inundated with emails from brands you've never interacted with.

For years, Free Press Action has sounded the alarm about a simple truth: Social-media platforms and other tech companies are harvesting a ton of our personal information for profit.

These practices are largely unregulated, and they're more out of control than ever. That's the distressing truth exposed in Free Press Action’s new report, Insatiable: The Tech Industry’s Quest for All Our Data. And it’s a wake-up call. Key findings in our report include:

• Tech companies have been allowed to self-regulate their data-collection practices for more than two decades now — and they’ve failed to protect user privacy and civil rights. Many of their business models are built on exploiting our demographic and behavioral data for profit.
• These same companies use so-called privacy policies — those long terms of service that people generally ignore when signing up for a social-media platform or mobile app — to allow them to profit off our data.
• Even if every user diligently and regularly reads through each platform’s privacy policy updates, they would still not have a full picture of how their data is collected and used by platforms, let alone by the myriad other companies whose websites and mobile apps we interact with on a regular basis.

Our data should be ours. Companies like Meta and Google shouldn't have this much access to our personal information. There should be strict limits on how much data these voracious media giants can collect about us.

And here’s the thing: We’re at a critical inflection point in this fight to protect our data privacy. The White House is rushing to rein in possible abuses related to artificial intelligence (AI), which is encouraging.

But at the same time, tech companies are furiously updating their terms of service and privacy policies to give themselves explicit permission to train generative AI models using our personal data.

Without swift legislative and regulatory action, the data mining of our interests, identities and behaviors will remain a lucrative business model — and continue unchecked.

That’s where you come in: Help Free Press Action turn the findings from our new report into action with a donation of $10 or any amount today.

There’s no sugarcoating it: Our personal data is under attack. But Free Press Action is fighting back.

Thanks so much for your support,

All of us at Free Press Action
freepress.net

P.S. You can read the full Insatiable report on our website.