🌋 FTC Takes Aim at Social Media’s Data Harvesting
posted 19 Sept 2024
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) criticized several social media companies, including Meta, Google, and ByteDance, for collecting and processing user data without sufficient oversight or transparency. The collected data often includes age, gender, language, income, and other information of interest to advertisers.
These data points are primarily used for targeted advertising, and companies are expected to provide proper protection, including shielding this information from being utilized in AI training processes—something that is not currently happening. Moreover, these companies also acquire data from third-party brokers and other platforms to create a unified user profile.
Surveillance practices can endanger people’s privacy, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a host of harms, from identify theft to stalking,said F.T.C.’s chair Lina Kahn.
A four-year analysis, drawing on data from 2019 and 2020, recommends implementing federal legislation to safeguard user privacy and strictly oversee these processes, as self-regulation has been largely ineffective and, in some instances, has failed altogether.
The report refrains from naming individual social networks, as it is difficult to pinpoint which platform maintains the most responsible practices. However, all these companies are facing accusations of negatively affecting teenagers' mental health, making it unnecessary to single out any one platform.
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