Surveillance Ad Tracking Tools Collect Users’ Sensitive Information by Default, Big Tech Tracking Tools Won’t to Follow Universal Opt-Out required by Oregon California and Colorado
WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., urged major tech companies to stop putting small businesses at risk of violating state privacy laws and to let Americans more easily opt-out of invasive surveillance by their advertising tracking tools, in a letter sent on Tuesday.
Writing to the heads of Google, Meta and TikTok, Wyden noted that the companies’ advertising tracking tools are designed to collect information on users by default to capture what websites they view, and what sensitive information they enter into sites online. That information is sent back to tech companies to fuel targeted advertising algorithms. These big tech companies all offer alternate modes that limit the data that is collected and shared by their trackers to comply with strict privacy laws enacted by a number of states, but these settings are disabled by default, and must be enabled by each business that embeds the companies’ trackers on their website or app.
“By making privacy-invasive tracking that is banned in several states the default, your platforms shift the entire burden of legal compliance onto small businesses, non-profits, and local organizations that lack the specialized legal teams or engineering resources to recognize their legal peril,” Wyden wrote. “When a local shop, a community healthcare provider, or a main-street business in Oregon deploys your tracking tools using your standard out-of-the-box configurations, they understandably expect that your tools allow them to comply with state or local laws out of the box — and do not expect that they are needlessly placed in severe legal jeopardy if they don’t take further action.”
Oregon, California, Colorado, Texas, Virginia, Connecticut, and Utah all have state privacy laws that restrict how businesses can process sensitive data. Oregon, California and Colorado require sites to respect the Global Privacy Control, a one-click way to opt-out of surveillance advertising trackers. Google Ads, the TikTok Pixel and the Meta Pixel, however, don’t recognize and respect the global privacy control, instead forcing small business owners to add functionality to their websites to recognize the privacy signal and then trigger the relevant setting in the companies’ tracking tools.
Wyden has been a leader in the Senate pushing for stronger consumer privacy protections. His Mind Your Own Business Act was the first Senate bill that would have required sites to respect one-click privacy signals like the Global Privacy Control, and was an inspiration for California’s privacy law. He is the lead Senate sponsor of the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act, which would outlaw targeted advertising to protect Americans’ privacy.
A copy of the full letter is available here.