TAKE BACK THE POWER TO CHOOSE

83% of us don’t want the personal data we’ve shared with the social media company to be used for targeted ads.

Who gets to choose how our life looks like, what opportunities we’re offered?

Big Tech companies think they should be able to decide about our life and future and freely influence what we see and do.

However, their model is based on exploiting our private conversations, intimate moments with family and friends, and our interactions with the content we’re most prone to engage with. People are reduced to mere data points companies associate as us, that ignore the context of our life – but in the same time influence it. What we see online is limited to what BigTech’s algorithms have decided.

Turn off the manipulation machine! Big Tech’s toxic recommender systems, surveillance ads and algorithms must stop!

The effects of these tools are staggering. Surveillance ads and recommendation algorithms can change vote results, deprive people of life opportunities and harm our mental health. And we’ve seen all of this happening:

• People’s data on Facebook was exploited by Cambridge analytica who later used surveillance ads for political campaigns on the platforms.
• Facebook’s targeting algorithm offered different job’s adverts based on gender and age of the users.
• Facebook’s algorithms deliver personalised ads that exploited users’ mental vulnerabilities such as trauma.
• Teenagers having their mental health eroded by Instagram’s algorithms.

Big Tech Companies argue surveillance ads and toxic recommendation algorithms give us a better experience. Surveys show a huge majority of us oppose being targeted by surveillance ads. Despite this, we are harmed, discriminated against and not allowed to choose what our experience should look like. We must be able to choose our platform experience, independent of BigTech’s commercial choices.

It is time for these platforms to de-risk their design, detox their algorithms and give users real control over them.