U.S. gov’t accuses social media giants of ‘vast surveillance’
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) claims that a years-long investigation demonstrates that social media behemoths engaged in “vast surveillance” to profit from people’s personal information.
A study based on enquiries made to nine businesses almost four years ago discovered that they may keep the data they gathered on users and non-users of their platforms indefinitely and that they sometimes obtained vast amounts of data through data brokers.
FTC Chair Lina Khan stated in a statement that the study “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.” “Several companies’ inadequate failure to safeguard children and teenagers online is particularly concerning.
Khan said that the monitoring methods put people’s privacy in jeopardy and made them vulnerable to identity theft and stalking.
According to the research, several of the organisations’ business models, which mostly entail targeted advertising, incentivised the widespread acquisition of user data, so putting profit ahead of privacy.
“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,” Khan stated.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau said that consumers of the internet are aware that targeted advertisements cover the cost of free online services and that the trade association “vehemently” supports a comprehensive national data privacy law.
“We find it disappointing that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) continues to portray the digital advertising sector as active.”in ‘mass commercial surveillance,'” IAB chief executive David Cohen said in a post responding to the report.
Khan said that the monitoring methods put people’s privacy in jeopardy and made them vulnerable to identity theft and stalking.
This couldn’t be further from the reality, since innumerable research projects demonstrate that customers recognise value exchanges and appreciate the chance to obtain heavily subsidised or free content and services.”
The conclusions were based on responses to requests made in late 2020 to a number of businesses, including X, Meta, YouTube, Snap, Amazon, the owner of Twitch, and ByteDance, the parent firm of TikTok.
A Google representative, Jose Castaneda, told AFP that the company “has the strictest privacy policies in our industry—we never sell people’s personal information and we don’t use sensitive information to serve ads.”
Google forbids ad personalisation for individuals under the age of eighteen, according to Castaneda.
& doesn’t target advertisements for users of YouTube’s “made for kids content”
The study concluded that data gathering procedures were “woefully inadequate” and that several businesses had not erased all of the data that customers had requested.
According to the research, organisations’ sharing of data also sparked questions about how well they were safeguarding individuals’ personal information.
Along with maintaining that social media companies were lax when it came to protecting children using their platforms, the FTC staff cited a report that such platforms were found to harm the mental health of young users.
The report called for social media companies to rein in data collection practices and for the U.S. Congress to pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation to limit surveillance of those using such platforms.