Tech and social media companies conduct “vast surveillance” of users

Social media is all about followers, but the real followers may be the platforms themselves.

In a report released Thursday, The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said top tech and social media companies—Amazon (which owns Twitch), Facebook, YouTube, Twitter/X, Snap, ByteDance (which owns TikTok), Discord, Reddit, and WhatsApp—“engaged in vast surveillance of consumers in order to monetize their personal information while failing to adequately protect users online, especially children and teens.” Targeted advertising was cited as a main motivator for the platforms’ data collection practices.

The report, which is the result of an FTC study focused on the nine companies that began in December 2020 found that they collected personal data from users—and non-users in some cases—at a “staggering” level, and that many of them “failed to implement adequate safeguards against privacy risks.” In addition to data-sharing, the FTC found that companies were able to “indefinitely retain troves of data,” and that some “did not delete all user data in response to user data deletion requests.”

Additionally, many users “lacked any meaningful control” over how their personal information was being used for AI purposes, the report found.

“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 identity theft to stalking,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a press release announcing the report.

In the press release, Khan, a fierce critic of Big Tech before she joined the FTC, described some companies’ protection measures around kids and teens “especially troubling.” According to the report, many children under age 13 remained on platforms despite age restrictions, and teens were often subject to the same data collection practices as adult users.

Kate Sheerin, head of US and Canada public policy at Discord, told Marketing Brew in an email that the report “lumps very different models into one bucket” and suggested that Discord is distinct from the other companies mentioned in the report.

“We are a real-time communications platform with strong user privacy controls and no feeds for endless scrolling,” she said. “At the time of the study, Discord did not run a formal digital advertising service, which is a central pillar of the report.”

In a statement, José Castañeda, policy communications at Google (which owns YouTube), told Marketing Brew that “we never sell people’s personal information and we don’t show personalized ads based on sensitive information.” He added that “we also prohibit ad personalization for users under 18 and we don’t serve personalized ads on ‘made for kids content’ on YouTube, regardless of who is watching.”

Snap declined to comment. Amazon, Meta (which owns Facebook and WhatsApp), X, TikTok, and Reddit did not immediately respond to Marketing Brew’s requests for comment.

What now? The report is the latest scrutiny that Big Tech and social media platforms have faced from state and federal lawmakers amid rising concerns about data privacy and teen safety on social media platforms. Some companies have taken steps that they say protect user privacy and make kids safer on their platforms; earlier this week, Instagram implemented additional restrictions for users under 18.

TikTok is also facing the threat of a potential federal ban due to its Chinese ownership, with a deadline to sell the app fast approaching.

The FTC, which noted in the report that companies may be incentivized to collect the most data—often at users’ expense—to “achieve market dominance,” recommended that the federal government pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation to “limit surveillance, address baseline protections, and grant consumers data rights.”

It also asked companies to, among other things, limit data collection and data-sharing with third parties, cease using ad-tracking technologies, and go beyond the child online safety requirements in COPPA, the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act. An updated version, called COPPA 2.0, recently passed the Senate with bipartisan support.

“COPPA should be the floor, not the ceiling,” the report said.