It’s the digital security training team at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), with security news that keeps you, your sources, and your devices safe. If someone shared this newsletter with you, please subscribe here.

Weird flex, but OK, data brokers

At the risk of drawing more public scrutiny and regulatory blowback, one would think that representatives of the ad industry would not want to brag about how much they use data brokers — companies that primarily collect and sell information about you. Instead, the CEO of a French Publicis Groupe boasts of the advertising company’s abilities to predict consumer behaviors using data scraped from public social media sites, consumer behavioral data, and data broker services. In a very creepy video, the CEO walks through the capabilities of the company’s CoreAI product, which pulls together data from disparate sources with the goal of more effectively targeting ads by predicting a person’s behaviors.

What you can do

  • Fight back against ad surveillance. While changes to Chrome browser kneecapped a number of ad-blocking extensions, the developers behind the popular ad blocker, uBlock Origin, now support a compliant new version for Chrome called uBlock Origin Lite. The extension is also supported on Firefox, Edge, and Opera. Download it here. You can always disable it for websites you trust and want to support. (Or, you know, subscribe and give them some money.)
  • Go further. While you’re at it, you can also block many tracking tools on the web using the Privacy Badger extension. Download it here.
  • Opt out of data brokers. You can manually remove yourself from many data brokers by following instructions listed in journalist Yael Grauer’s Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List. But these services will often pull in your data again and integrate new sources of information, so it may be worthwhile to also purchase a data broker opt-out service such as DeleteMe or Optery.

Updates from our team

  • Reminder: My colleague Davis Erin Anderson is leading an NYC School of Data session on keeping your data safe in 2025. If you're around NYC, come check it out at 2:30 p.m. on March 29. Learn more here.

Our team is always ready to assist journalists with digital security concerns. Reach out here, and stay safe and secure out there.

Best,
Martin

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Martin Shelton
Deputy Director of Digital Security
Freedom of the Press Foundation