FTC calls for halt to social media companies’ user surveillance

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report has found that social media and streaming services monitor user data to monetize personal information.

The report, published today (September 20), revealed that these companies “engaged in vast surveillance of consumers” to apply a price tag to their data. The information was acquired as a part of a swathe of 6(b) orders sent out by the FTC in December 2020.

These significant companies dominate social media and video-on-demand and have been making billions of dollars from users’ personal data. Not all of these users are adults, as the report showed approximately 95% of teenagers and 40% of children between the ages of eight and 12 years old use some form of social media.

An order of this kind falls under the FTC Act, which allows any company or entity to be subject to a 6 (b) order. The FTC thus conducts wide-ranging studies that do not have a specific law enforcement purpose but attempt to gather information.

At the time, the FTC sought information from Amazon.com, Inc., ByteDance Ltd., which operates the short video service TikTok, Discord Inc., Facebook, Inc., Reddit, Inc., Snap Inc., Twitter, Inc., WhatsApp Inc., and YouTube LLC.

The FTC sought information related to how social media and video streaming services collect, use, track, estimate, or derive personal and demographic information. In addition, the orders endeavored to determine how ads and other content affect consumers and how certain algorithms track content, especially for teens and minors.

The report found that the business models of the companies investigated were keen on harvesting data at the risk of personal security. Their money-generating advertising campaigns came ahead of policy and privacy, with the report stating that this was conducted, “especially through targeted advertising, which accounts for most of their revenue.”

The report’s key takeaways also call for tighter restrictions on companies and their ability to harvest data. The FTC also calls for Congress to tighten the provisions of the data coalition ability at a federally regulated level, saying, “Congress should pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation to limit surveillance, address baseline protections, and grant consumers data rights.”

The report suggests that federal privacy legislation should be reviewed by Congress to protect minors and teens from viewing or interacting with sensitive content. This should, the report enthuses be carried out with enforceable “data minimization and retention policies, limit data sharing with third parties and affiliates, delete consumer data when it is no longer needed, and adopt consumer-friendly privacy policies that are clear, simple, and easily understood.”

Image: FTC.

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