The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has called for more strict regulations around social media platforms’ data usage. FTC has released a report on the data-gathering practices of major social media apps.
The report says that the FTC has found many questionable data-gathering practices. FTC has examined the data-gathering practices around Twitch, Facebook, WhatsApp, X, Discord, Snapchat, Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube.
In its conclusion, the FTC says that most social media companies engage in “vast surveillance of consumers in order to monetize their personal information while failing to adequately protect users online, especially children and teens.”
You can check out the report published by the FTC. It examines the various ways in which these companies gather user data from their users and non-users. The reports also feature how these companies then use this data to power various elements of the platform.
According to this report, both users and non-users have virtually no way to opt out of how their data is used, especially by automated systems.
Here is what Lina Khan, the FTC chair, said about it.
“The report lays out how social media and video streaming companies harvest an enormous amount of Americans’ personal data and monetize it to the tune of billions of dollars a year. 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.”
Based on this report, the FTC has recommended that Congress pass enhanced privacy legislation in order to limit surveillance.
They also recommended that Congress pass federal privacy legislation to “fill the gap in privacy protections provided by COPPA for teens over the age of 13.”
With this report, we could eventually see an EU-style digital services act in the US to protect its users.
