Child welfare advocates renewed calls for U.S. lawmakers to pass a pair of controversial bills aimed at protecting youth from Big Tech’s “dangerous and unacceptable business practices” after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a report on Sept. 19 detailing how social media and streaming companies endanger children and teens who use their platforms.
The FTC staff report — entitled “A Look Behind the Screens: Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services” — “shows how the tech industry’s monetization of personal data has created a market for commercial surveillance, especially via social media and video streaming services, with inadequate guardrails to protect consumers.”
The agency staff examined the practices of Meta platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp; YouTube; X, formerly known as Twitter; Snapchat; Reddit; Discord; Amazon, which owns the gaming site Twitch; and ByteDance, the owner of TikTok.
“The report finds that these companies engaged in mass data collection of their users and — in some cases — nonusers,” Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine said in the paper.
“It reveals that many companies failed to implement adequate safeguards against privacy risks. It sheds light on how companies used our personal data, from serving hypergranular targeted advertisements to powering algorithms that shape the content we see, often with the goal of keeping us hooked on using the service.”
Hellbound and Down 