Massive Date Collection + Secretive Algorithms = The most highly targeted and effective advertising the world has ever seen
Tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon — which are expected to control 70% of all digital advertising by the end of 2020 — aren’t transparent about how ads and posts are targeted at their users.
These platforms know a lot about you: Where you live, what you watched on Netflix last night, how often you read your favorite news source, where you went on vacation last month, and virtually every other thing about you. Businesses, political campaigns, PACs, and other dark money groups are willing to spend lots of money to get this information and target their advertising at you. However, these ads are shown only to their intended audiences and then disappear, making it difficult to study and nearly impossible to keep advertisers accountable.
The ATI Browser Extension is a volunteer effort that empowers users like you to help keep political campaigns, PACs, dark money groups, and businesses accountable. After you install the extension in your browser, it will make an anonymized copy of the public posts and ads you come across on social media (you control exactly what and how much you share) and information about why an ad was targeted at you.
The information collected by you, the Algorithm Monitoring Community, will enable ground-breaking academic research and investigative journalism about how the algorithms that rule social media platforms impact our digital diet, politics, and society.