What we learned about choice and control online this year

Earlier this year, we invited you to join us in celebrating online choice, and to take a stand for independence and control in your digital life. It’s a call to action at the heart of our campaign Open What You Want, which celebrates autonomy, defiance, and showing up online exactly as you are, starting with the simple act of choosing your browser. It’s one of the most important digital decisions you can make, shaping how you experience the web, protect your data, and express yourself online.

We wanted to understand how people think about choice in their everyday lives, how they express it, celebrate it, and fight for it. So we took Firefox on the road to connect with our communities IRL to learn more.

From coffee raves to cosplay: What we learned about choice IRL

We showed up in places where choice is part of the experience — in cities and cultural hubs where creativity, fandom, and freedom of expression thrive. From the Heroes Festival in Freiburg and our House Blend day-rave series in Chicago, Berlin, LA, and Munich, to TwitchCon in San Diego, our Footbrawl tournament in Berlin, and Comic Con in Stuttgart.

Everywhere we went, one thing was clear: people love having real choice in the moments that matter to them — whether it’s picking the coffee blend that powers their day, choosing their cosplay or gaming character, or deciding how they show up online. 

But online, choice and control have slipped from our hands, and often, when it feels like we’re choosing, Big Tech platforms have already decided for us.

The reality of online choice today

To unpack this problem, we polled 8,000 adults over 18 years old in France, Germany, the UK and the U.S. on how they navigate choice and control both online and offline.  

The survey, conducted by research agency YouGov, showcases a tension between people’s desire to have control over their data and digital privacy, and the reality of the internet today — a reality defined by Big Tech platforms that make it difficult for people to exercise meaningful choice online:

• Only 16% feel in control of their privacy choices (highest in Germany at 21%)
• 24% feel it’s “too late” because Big Tech already has too much control or knows too much about them. And 36% said the feeling of Big Tech companies knowing too much about them is frustrating — highest among respondents in the U.S. (43%) and the UK (40%)
• Practices respondents said frustrated them were Big Tech using their data to train AI without their permission (38%) and tracking their data without asking (47%; highest in U.S. – 55% and lowest in France – 39%) 

And from our existing research on browser choice, we know more about how defaults that are hard to change and confusing settings can bury alternatives, limiting people’s ability to choose for themselves — the real problem that fuels these dynamics.

Taken together our new and existing insights could also explain why, when asked which actions feel like the strongest expressions of their independence online, choosing not to share their data (44%) was among the top three responses in each country (46% in the UK; 45% in the U.S.; 44% in France; 39% in Germany).

“At the heart of it, this study showcases why technology should serve humanity first and product design must be built with user agency, choice, and trust at the center,” says Ajit Varma, Product Vice President at Firefox. “When companies embrace this path, they can empower users and cultivate healthy competition that ultimately leads to better products for everyone.” 

We also see a powerful signal in how people think about choosing the communities and platforms they join — for 29% of respondents, this was one of their top three expressions of independence online.

“The kind of web communities thrive in — open, curious and shaped by its users — is increasingly at odds with the one Big Tech and the billionaires behind it are building. Powerful platforms today try to lock us into ecosystems and decide the products we use online,” says Christina Lang, VP of Global Marketing. “For Firefox, community has always been at the heart of what we do, and we’ll keep fighting to put real choice and control back in people’s hands so the web once again feels like it belongs to the communities that shape it.

And with Open What You Want, we set out to deliver an important message through a series of fun, unconventional experiences: choosing your browser is one of the most important digital decisions you can make.”

For more insights about local country findings from the survey, check our France, Germany, UK and U.S. (including U.S. findings deck) press releases.

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