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A new FTC report says the current data practices of these companies ‘fail to adequately protect users’ and is calling for further regulation.
A new report claims social media companies including Meta, X and YouTube conduct “vast surveillance of consumers” to monetise their personal information.
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) examined the data collection and use practices of various Big Tech players and found that they take vast amounts of data and fail to adequately protect users online – “especially children and teens”.
The report looked at nine companies – Amazon-owned Twitch, Meta, YouTube, X, Snap, ByteDance-owned TikTok, Discord, Reddit and Meta-owned WhatsApp. The FTC says these companies collected and could “indefinitely retain troves of data”, including data about both users and non-users on their platforms.
The details in the report raise various concerns – it claims the companies’ data collection, minimisation and retention practices are “woefully inadequate”. The report also found that some companies did not delete all user data in response to user deletion requests.
The FTC is recommending that US Congress pass federal privacy regulations based on what it has documented. It also warned that the business models of many of these companies do little to incentivise self-regulation or the protection of user data.
“The report lays out how social media and video streaming companies harvest an enormous amount of Americans’ personal data and monetise it to the tune of billions of dollars a year,” said FTC chair Lina M Khan. “While lucrative for the companies, these surveillance practices can endanger people’s privacy, threaten their freedoms and expose them to a host of harms, from identify theft to stalking.
“Several firms’ failure to adequately protect kids and teens online is especially troubling. The report’s findings are timely, particularly as state and federal policymakers consider legislation to protect people from abusive data practices.”
The report follows years of reports, investigations and legal action against various social media companies for their practices. For example, the EU is currently investigating whether Meta’s algorithms stimulate addictive behaviours in children.
In the US, Meta is in the middle of a massive federal lawsuit involving dozens of US attorneys general, which accuses the tech giant of harmful actions against children and teenagers. Meta has been the key focus in media reports, but the lawsuit includes multiple social media companies including YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok.
This week, DCU’s Dr Eileen Culloty told SiliconRepublic.com that many social media companies “claim to be neutral platforms – but they just aren’t”.
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