The Demand for Data Privacy
We aren't asleep. We're activated. What comes next?
If you saw
Amazon’s Ring doorbell aired a Super Bowl ad promoting Search Party, an AI feature that networks neighborhood cameras to find lost dogs, and thought “Wait.. wtf???” you’re not alone.
Over 120 million people watched that ad. The response was swift and visceral. Privacy experts called it a “surveillance nightmare.” A TikTok video calling the commercial “terrifying” hit over three million views. Senator Ed Markey wrote an open letter demanding Amazon turn off its facial recognition technology. Within days, Ring ended its partnership with surveillance firm Flock Safety.
The internet, quite literally, bullied a billion-dollar company into reversing course.
Meanwhile, the QuitGPT movement is gaining momentum as consumers cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions in protest. Over 200,000 people have signed on to the boycott, fueled by revelations about OpenAI executives’ political donations and the use of ChatGPT-powered tools in immigration enforcement. The campaign has celebrity backing, organizer infrastructure, and a growing coalition that includes climate organizers, pro-democracy activists, and tech workers themselves.
People are canceling subscriptions, switching platforms, rethinking their relationship with every tool they use.
Consumers aren’t asleep on data privacy. They’re activated.
Eighty percent of consumers say they wish they knew more about how their personal data is being used. Seventy-five percent won’t buy from companies they don’t trust with their data. This isn’t a niche concern anymore. This is mainstream consumer demand for privacy. Emotional. Urgent. Looking for a better way.
Tuning into the Benito Bowl brought reminders of corruption, lack of accountability, and overwhelming distrust of the systems we depend on.
But while the federal landscape has grown more hostile, something has been building beneath the headlines: state-level advocates and privacy technologists have been writing legislation and shipping real tools. They’re arriving at exactly the moment people need them most—but most of us are too busy reacting to the last crisis to notice they exist.
In January 2026, California launched DROP — the Delete Request and Opt-out Platform — the first government-built tool of its kind in the world. It lets Californians request deletion of their personal information from every registered data broker with a single click. The platform already has over 215,000 registrants. California’s AI Transparency Act, also effective January 1, now requires AI developers to disclose what datasets were used to train their models, including whether they contain copyrighted or personal information. Colorado’s Algorithmic Accountability Law took effect in February, giving consumers the right to notice, explanation, and appeal when AI makes decisions about their employment, healthcare, or education. The EU AI Act, the first ever legal framework for AI, becomes fully enforceable in August 2026.
These are big moves. But how many people outside of privacy policy circles know they exist? There’s a disconnect between the intensity of consumer concern and the tools people have to protect their data rights.
Right now, most of the public response falls into two modes: alarm or avoidance.
People are either anxious and overwhelmed, or they’re opting out entirely—deleting apps, boycotting platforms, disengaging. Neither leads to agency. Alarm burns you out, avoidance removes you from the game, and neither one connects you to the rights and tools that would actually change your position. Neither builds toward ownership.
This is a marketing problem as much as it is a policy problem.
Demand exists. Innovative solutions are being pushed forward. But we need to strengthen the bridge between them. I’ve seen this pattern before from my years in marketing: there’s massive demand, but the supply side—the solutions, the frameworks, the actionable next steps—isn’t being delivered with the same cultural fluency that created the problem.
The tools are being communicated in regulatory language, through policy channels, to compliance professionals. Progress stays siloed. The public—including the creators, entrepreneurs, and knowledge workers whose livelihoods run through the internet—is left stuck choosing between outrage and retreat.
So how do we overcome the spin cycle? How do we organize to create change that lasts?
We start with a fundamental reframe. The privacy conversation has been stuck in a defensive posture—protect yourself, lock down your accounts, read the fine print, delete your data. That puts the burden on individuals to shield themselves from systems designed to be invisible. We need to shift from defensiveness to digital sovereignty, where we understand our value, know our rights and build with intention. Then, we build the bridge.
The attention economy was built by marketers, storytellers, and behavioral designers. The response needs the same craft—engagement architecture that makes data rights feel as intuitive as the platforms that collect the data, and that reaches people where they are (and where they’re going next) instead of asking them to opt out of their lives.
This is the work I’ve been building toward. I’ve spent over a decade building campaigns with an approach I like to call movement building marketing. Movement building marketing converts attention into behavior change at scale. Campaigns end. A movement sustains itself because people internalize purpose and carry change forward.
At B Lab, I helped champion Vote Every Day. The message: every purchase you make is a vote for the world you want to live in. We engaged millions that pushed the conversation past corporate accountability and embedded itself into daily consumer behavior. At the Cyber Collective, I helped develop Internet Street Smarts—a program that embedded digital safety into communities around the world by bridging cultural context and shared language.
Data privacy needs this same approach. Beyond awareness (beyond the algorithms !), we need to introduce a lifestyle shift. One where you know your rights the way you know your values. Where choosing a platform feels as intentional as choosing what you eat. Where you’re not deleting out of fear, you’re building out of fluency. That world doesn’t exist yet for most people. But marketing can paint that picture—and movement building marketing can make people want to live in it.
The answer is in activating and engaging people—online and IRL.
Who wants to do this together?!
Callie Rojewski is the founder of Online & IRL, where she helps entrepreneurs build beyond the algorithms through strategy, community, and experiences.