While spying on people is creepy, the Federal Trade Commission says in a new report that that’s exactly what social media and streaming services do every day, on a massive scale.
In a report released on Tuesday, FTC chair Lana Kim called out nine companies that run 13 different platforms — including social media giants like TikTok and Meta, Facebook’s parent company — for their “vast surveillance” of their users.
A study that began in 2020 found that the companies — Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Snap, ByteDance, Discord, Reddit and WhatsApp — are collecting and sharing more personal information than the users may realize.
They’re also leveraging their dominance in the market to shut out smaller competitors.
The agency also declared the companies insisting they would police themselves a “failure,” with the report suggesting the government needs to step in to regulate how these companies collect and use this information.
“As many of these firms pivot to developing and deploying AI, while continuing to shroud their practices in secrecy and implementing minimal safeguards to protect users, we must not continue to let the foxes guard the henhouse,” the report stated.
“Protecting users — especially children and teens — requires clear baseline protections that apply across the board.”