A recent investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) looks into how major social media and video services acquire and use user data. The research claims that the firms monitor users closely in order to profit from their personal data, but they do not take any action to protect users’ online safety, particularly that of kids and teenagers.
The staff report is based on answers to 6(b) orders that were sent to nine companies, including some of the biggest streaming and social media organisations, in December 2020: The owners of the gaming network Twitch and Amazon.com, Inc.; the video-sharing platform TikTok is owned by ByteDance Ltd.; YouTube LLC; Twitter, Inc. (now X Corp.); Snap Inc.; Facebook, Inc. (now Meta Platforms, Inc.); WhatsApp Inc.
The FTC is specifically looking for information about: how users’ personal information is gathered, used, tracked, estimated, or obtained by social media and video streaming services; how they choose which advertisements and other content to display to users; whether or not they use algorithms or data analytics to process user data; how they track, measure, and analyse user engagement; and how their actions impact minor.
By a vote of 4-1, the Commission decided to give the nine social media and video service providers the 6(b) orders.
“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,”
FTC Chair Lina M. Khan stated
The staff study goes on to show how many businesses shared a lot of data, which raises serious questions about how well-controlled and supervised their data handling processes are.
According to the staff evaluation, the majority of corporations allowed young people to use their platforms without any limits, and social networking and video streaming services frequently treated teenagers in the same way as adult users.
A few possible effects of the corporations’ data practices on competitiveness were also mentioned in the research. It was mentioned that businesses who gather a lot of user data might be able to dominate their industry, which could result in negative behaviours where businesses prioritise collecting information over customer privacy.
The corporations’ many ways of feeding users’ and non-users’ personal data into their automated systems, including for use by their algorithms, data analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI), were emphasised in the staff report.
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