You are being tracked, profiled & targeted online. It's time to ban targeted advertising.

Recently, the Norwegian Consumer Council published a report calling for a ban on surveillance-based ads. In solidarity, Tutanota joined the undersigned privacy-first organizations to send the following letter to EU and US regulators on July 7th, 2021, to encourage them to take action during legislative sessions and any relevant privacy discussions.

Update 2022-04-26:

We are happy to announce that the Tracking-free Ads Coalition has achieved a lot in the upcoming DSA regulation, which is expected to be put into legislation in 2023. Dutch MEP Paul Tang says:

“Thanks to the great work of the members and supporters of the Tracking-free Ads Coalition, such as DSA-rapporteur Christel Schaldemose, targeting of minors and targeting with the use of sensitive data for advertising purposes will be prohibited."

"Even though we didn’t achieve to end all tracking and targeting, we managed to get this topic on the political agenda. And from today onwards, Europe is the first government in the world to effectively limit tracking ads. This is a huge blow for Google and Facebook who have been dominating the global advertising market for years.”

Original call of the Tracking-free Ads Coalition to ban targeted advertisements

Time to ban targeted ads

Surveillance-based, targeted advertising permeates the internet today, creating a number of highly problematic issues for both consumers and businesses. This needs to stop.

On June 23, a broad coalition of consumer rights organizations, civil rights groups, NGOs, as well as academics, researchers, privacy experts, and enthusiasts – all concerned individuals – called on regulators to stop the invasive and privacy-hostile practices related to surveillance-based advertising.

In the EU, they urged regulators to consider a ban on surveillance-based advertising as a part of the Digital Services Act. In the U.S., they urged legislators to enact comprehensive privacy legislation. We are a group of businesses who write to you today to show our support to this initiative. We represent small, medium, and large businesses who all believe – and demonstrate on a daily basis – that it is possible to run profitable companies without exploiting the privacy of individuals.

In addition to the clear privacy issues caused by surveillance-based advertising, it is also detrimental to the business landscape.

In the surveillance-based advertising model, a few actors can obtain competitive advantages by collecting data from across websites and services and dominant platform actors can abuse their positions by giving preference to their own services.

These practices seriously undermine competition and take revenue away from content creators. Anti-competitive behavior and effects serve to entrench dominant actors’ positions while complex supply chains and ineffective technologies lead to lost revenues for advertisers and publishers.

It is also difficult for consumers to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ actors in the digital sphere, which means that legitimate actors, amongst them many small and medium-sized enterprises, are directly affected by the actions of unscrupulous companies.

This harms consumers and businesses and can undermine the cornerstones of democracy.

Although we recognize that advertising is an important source of revenue for content creators and publishers online, this does not justify the massive commercial surveillance systems set up in attempts to “show the right ad to the right people”.

Other forms of advertising technologies exist, which do not depend on spying on consumers, and alternative models can be implemented without significantly affecting revenue. On the contrary – and that we can attest to – businesses can thrive without privacy-invasive practices.

We encourage you to take a stand and ban surveillance-based advertising.

With kind regards,

Vivaldi Technologies, Jon von Tetzchner, CEO & Tatsuki Tomita, COO

Fastmail Pty Ltd, Bron Gondwana, CEO

Conva Ventures Inc., dba. Fathom Analytics, Jack Ellis & Paul Jarvis, Directors

Proton Technologies AG, Dr. Andy Yen, CEO

Tutao GmbH, dba. Tutanota, Matthias Pfau, Co-Founder and CEO

DuckDuckGo, Inc., Gabriel Weinberg, Founder and CEO

Disconnect Inc., Casey Oppenheim, Co-founder and CEO

Mojeek Limited, Colin Hayhurst, CEO

Ecosia GmbH, Christian Kroll, CEO

Startpage & StartMail, Robert E.G. Beens, Co-Founder and CEO

Nextcloud GmbH, Frank Karlitschek, Founder and CEO

Kobler, Erik Bugge, CEO

Strossle International, Håkon Tillier, CEO & Rickard Lawson, CMO

Mailfence, Patrick De Schutter, Co-Founder and Managing Director