FTC finds social media and video streaming services engaged in vast surveillance of consumers

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report that examines the data collection and use practices of major social media and video streaming services, finding that—and this will not come as a surprise to our regular readers—the companies engaged in vast surveillance of consumers in order to monetize their personal information while failing to adequately protect users online, especially children and teens.

The report, called A Look Behind the Scenes: Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services, is based on responses from nine companies to questions about how the companies collect, track, and use personal and demographic information, how they determine which ads and other content are shown to consumers, whether and how they apply algorithms or data analytics to personal and demographic information, and how their practices impact children and teens.

The companies that were ordered to respond own some of the household social media and streaming service names. They are Amazon (Twitch), Meta (Facebook and Instagram), YouTube, X (Twitter), Snap (Snapchat), ByteDance (TikTok), Discord, Reddit, and WhatsApp.

Some of the specific information that the FTC was looking for included:

How social media and video streaming services collect, use, track, estimate, or derive personal and demographic information. How they determine which ads and other content are shown to consumers. Whether they apply algorithms or data analytics to personal information. How they measure, promote, and research user engagement. How their practices affect children and teens.

The conclusions seemed to upset the FTC, but we weren’t even mildly surprised:

“The amount of data collected by large tech companies is simply staggering. They track what we read, what websites we visit, whether we are married and have children, our educational level and income bracket, our location, our purchasing habits, our personal interests, and in some cases even our health conditions and religious faith. They track what we do on and off their platforms, often combining their own information with enormous data sets purchased through the largely unregulated consumer data market.”

The FTC also mentions that some of these companies increasingly rely on hidden pixels and other means of tracking visitors, not only on their own, but also on other websites, to track our behavior down to every click.

Some of the responders were even unable to identify all the data points they collected or all of the third parties they shared that data with.

The report comes to the conclusion that self-regulation is not the answer to these problems. We can see all around the news that with the rise of the artificial platforms that many of these companies are developing, the incentive to use our data for their own purposes is only growing.

“Predicting, shaping, and monetizing human behavior through commercial surveillance is extremely profitable.”

US Federal Trade Commission, “A Look Behind the Screens: Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services”

This has created a number of companies that have a huge influence on our economy, our democracy, and our society as a whole. Companies that, it appears, believe they can dodge the obligation to provide the Commission with complete answers while hiding their collection practices with limited, incomplete, or unhelpful responses that appear to have been carefully crafted to be self-serving, and to avoid revealing key pieces of information.

While their services provide us with the option to connect with the world from the palm of your hand, many of them have been at the forefront of building the infrastructure for mass commercial surveillance. They have access to information about every aspect of our lives and our behavior.

This comes not only with costs to our privacy, it harms our competitive landscape and affects the way we communicate and our well-being, especially the well-being of children and teens.

Some of the key findings of the report are:

Many of the companies collected and could indefinitely retain troves of data from and about users and non-users, and they did so in ways consumers might not expect. Many of the responding companies relied on selling advertising services to other businesses based largely on using the personal information of their users. The technology powering this ecosystem took place behind the scenes and out of view to consumers, posing significant privacy risks. Algorithms, data analytics, and/or AI were applied to users’ and non-users’ personal information. These technologies controlled everything from content recommendation to search, advertising, and inferring personal details about users, while the users lacked any meaningful control over how personal information was used for AI-fueled systems. The trend among the responding companies was that they failed to adequately protect children, but especially teens, who are not covered by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA).

The recommendations of the FTC focus on legislation about the transparency of the data-usage, disclosure of sensitive personal data for advertising purposes, and the need to protect young users from the information-absorbing tech giants.

For more details and specific answers from each of the companies, you can check the 129 page report.

I want to close this off with a quote from the report that we whole-heartedly agree with:

“Our privacy cannot be the price we pay to accomplish ordinary basic daily activities”

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