Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Ron Wyden said today he has joined Senate colleagues to urge the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to reject X’s petition to end the company’s privacy responsibilities under a unanimously approved 2022 order.
In its petition, X makes the extraordinary and baseless claim that rebranding Twitter as X frees the company from the privacy obligations it inherited. Beyond this claim, X’s other arguments that the order’s compliance is too costly, the company should be trusted to self-regulate, and ending the obligations under this order would serve the public interest in the American AI race are similarly frivolous. The senators therefore call for the FTC to reject X’s self-serving attempt to evade its legal responsibilities.
“The 2022 order defines ‘Respondent’ to include Twitter’s ‘successors and assigns,’ and its carve-out for genuinely distinct businesses applies only to entities that do not ‘collect, maintain, use, disclose, access, or provide access to’ data that previously enabled Twitter’s services — a condition X plainly does not meet,” the lawmakers wrote FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson. “A name change and new leadership do not undo that legal continuity. If they did, any company could escape an FTC order simply by merging with a new entity or changing its name. The Commission should require X to comply with the 2022 order it inherited.”
The lawmakers continued, “X’s claim that compliance with the 2022 order is too costly rings hollow given the company’s scale … Musk, the company’s owner, is the richest person in the world, with sufficient personal wealth to support the company. More importantly, independent privacy and security oversight is not an optional expense to be cut when it becomes inconvenient. A company cannot earn early release from a privacy order simply by saying that compliance costs money.”
The letter was led by U.S. Senator Edward J. Markey, D-Mass. In addition to Wyden, the letter was signed by U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
The full text of the letter is here.
A web version of this release is here.
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