It’s easy to see tech companies as a monolithic villain in the battle over consumer privacy. But in fact, there are countless tech companies, like mine, that believe that people have a fundamental right to avoid being put under surveillance and that it should be easy for them to exercise that right. By contrast, it is the big ad-tech companies — especially Facebook and Google — that do not want to make it easy for consumers to avoid profiling, because their business models rely on it. They are resisting change to other proven models of advertising, even though other companies are showing that it works.

This distinction between Big Ad Tech and everyone else in tech is important to keep in mind as policymakers consider new regulations intended to protect consumers’ privacy. Executives of these big companies may individually make public statements welcoming federal regulation, but in practice they are doing everything they can to weaken existing laws and shape new ones in their own interests. This strategy is very obvious to the rest of us in the tech industry. And it’s essential to get these privacy laws right today, so that people have the opportunity to opt out of online tracking now.

The most significant example of Big Ad Tech’s influence on privacy regulation is in California, which passed the California Consumer Privacy Act in 2018. Industry groups representing Big Ad Tech are leading the charge to weaken the law through amendments that would exempt the sharing of personal data for ads, as Fast Company recently reported. This type of “exemption” is not a minor change; it would weaken the law so much as to make it almost meaningless. As Jacob Snow of the A.C.L.U. of Northern California put it, “A privacy law shouldn’t have a targeted advertisement exception for the same reason that an environmental law shouldn’t have a coal mining exception.”