FTC Agrees Social Media and Streaming Services Surveil People

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says that many popular social media websites and streaming services are engaged in “vast surveillance” of users.

The FTC's survey concluded that social media sites and streaming services engage in “vast surveillance of consumers in order to monetize their personal information while failing to adequately protect users online,” including children and teens. The surveillance compromises people’s privacy, the FTC warned, exposing them to identity theft, stalking, and other online harms.

This is hardly a shocking reveal. We’ve known about Meta’s privacy ill practices for years now, but now there’s a study to back up what privacy experts and advocates have been warning us about all along. Importantly, there is no enforceable action here. The FTC has decided to release its findings so that Congress could eventually act on them. That might be easier said than done, however, as House lawmakers haven’t even passed the Kids Online Safety Act.

The biggest US-owned platforms in the survey include Amazon’s gaming service Twitch, Meta’s Facebook and WhatsApp, and Google’s YouTube. Other popular sites were named, too, including Reddit, Snapchat, and X. ByteDance’s TikTok is the only non-U.S. platform named. Worryingly, the survey found many services don’t restrict accounts for teens.

It also discovered multiple ways that social media sites and streaming services harvest useful information from people who use them, including tracking ads, collecting engagement data, and storing direct inputs from users. External data obtained from corporate affiliates and data brokers is leveraged, too. Services even collect data from people who don’t use them!

Online services also use analytical processing, artificial intelligence, and algorithms to infer additional data. Coupled with “woefully inadequate” data handling controls and retention policies, this is a recipe for a privacy disaster in case a company gets hacked. Unlike the European Union where online services must provide options for people to download and delete their data from online services, there’s no such legislation in the U.S. as yet. As a result, the survey has made a startling discovery that some companies don’t even bother deleting user data in response to account deletion requests.

Data is the strongest currency in the digital economy. The named services harvest “an enormous amount of Americans’ personal data and monetize it to the tune of billions of dollars a year,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. The report also mentions earlier research which linked feelings of exclusion and mental distress in adolescents to exposure to social media.

Source: FTC via Engadget