What is this campaign?
B.C.’s Human Rights Commissioner is running the Can You STOP IT? campaign to raise awareness about how mis- and disinformation are damaging our society and what we can do to STOP it from spreading.
The campaign includes an online quiz, the STOP tool , an in-person display, support for community-level projects, advertising and other resources and engagements.
Where we’re advertising
The ad that brought you here may have been on a social media or video-sharing site or a website or app that sells programmatic ad placements.
Social media ads use information you have provided to the social media and video-sharing platforms you’ve signed up for—including the profiles and pages you like and the content you engage with—to determine whether you might be interested in the campaign.
Programmatic ads are a little more complicated, but in short, these are ads that we buy through a service that uses algorithms to decide where ads end up being placed. We tell the service who we want to reach and what kinds of websites or apps we want to use to reach them, and the service automatically places the ads on relevant sites across the internet.
Ad targeting and your privacy
Our aim is to show ads for this campaign to people in B.C. who follow the news of the day and who know the basics of what misinformation is but haven’t really engaged with the issue.
In accordance with the position articulated by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, we are not using any data obtained without consent (e.g., data from zombie cookies or device fingerprinting) and we are not using any data from children or youth under 18 to the best of our knowledge.
The data we rely on to target these ads is only available in aggregate, meaning neither we nor the providers we work with can associate any information with a particular person. We also do not collect or retain any ad targeting data ourselves.
Assumptions and stereotyping
We don’t want to make assumptions about who you are. Our ad targeting uses only information you’ve actually shared and/or information that can be reasonably inferred based on device location information you’ve consented to share combined with Statistics Canada data about people in your local area.
Limiting ourselves to first-party consent and aggregate data means our targeting will not be perfect—so if you saw an ad but aren’t a part of our target audience, you may have been mistargeted or you might just be seeing a targeted ad based on the content of the website it appears on.
Opting out
The ad providers we are using for this campaign unfortunately don’t have clear ways for you to opt out of receiving our ads. However, you can delete your cookies and review consents you have provided to apps and device operating systems and/or adjust your social media profile settings.
Questions or feedback
BCOHRC’s Privacy Officer is responsible for ensuring our Office complies with applicable privacy laws and can be reached at [email protected]. Other questions or feedback can be directed to [email protected].