FTC Says Social Media Platforms Engage in ‘Vast Surveillance’ of Users

Social media platforms are engaging in “vast surveillance” of people online and failing to protect children, according to a new report from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. And if you thought Big Tech was serious about calling for FTC Chair Lina Khan to be fired before, just wait until this report properly trickles through Silicon Valley today.

The FTC issued a warning letter back in late 2020 to nine social media and video streaming services alleging their operations were “dangerously opaque” and said their data collection techniques and algorithms were “shrouded in secrecy.” The companies—Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, X, Snap, ByteDance, Discord, Reddit, and WhatsApp—were told the FTC would be investigating their practices and Thursday’s report is the result of those efforts.

The report notes that the amount of data collected by large tech companies is enormous, even using the words “simply staggering,” to describe how both users and non-users alike can be tracked in myriad ways. And that data that’s collected directly by platforms is then combined with data from third-party brokers to compile an even more detailed picture of any given person, according to the FTC.

“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. And large firms are increasingly relying on hidden pixels and similar technologies—embedded on other websites—to track our behavior down to each click,” the FTC report reads.

“In fact, the Companies collected so much data that in response to the Commission’s questions, they often could not even identify all the data points they collected or all of the third parties
they shared that data with,” the report continues.

The report also warns that AI is complicating the picture even more, with companies feeding data into their artificial intelligence training without consistent approaches to monitoring or testing standards.

The report lists things the FTC would like policymakers to do, emphasizing that “self-regulation is not the answer,” while also laying out changes the big tech companies are supposed to make. On the policymaker side, the FTC says Congress should pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation to limit surveillance and give consumers rights over their data. The FTC also advocates for new privacy legislation that it says will “fill in the gap in privacy protections” that exist in the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, abbreviated as COPPA.

As for the companies, the FTC wants to see these platforms limit data collection and implement “concrete and enforceable data minimization and retention policies.” The FTC also calls on the companies to limit the sharing of data with third parties and to delete consumer data when it’s not needed anymore. The new report also calls on companies to, “not collect sensitive information through privacy-invasive ad tracking technologies,” which include pixel trackers, and give better protections to teens.

But, again, this report is likely to only increase the calls for Khan to be fired, which have grown louder in the business community in recent months.

“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,” Lina Khan said in a statement published online.

“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 identify theft to stalking. Several firms’ failure to adequately protect kids and teens online is especially troubling. The Report’s findings are timely, particularly as state and federal policymakers consider legislation to protect people from abusive data practices.”

Gizmodo reached out to all nine of the tech companies mentioned by name in the new report but only Discord and Google responded immediately while Meta, which owns Facebook and WhatsApp, declined to comment.

Google gave Gizmodo a very short statement about the 129-page report, only focusing on rather narrow issues like reselling data and ad personalization for kids.

Discord sent a more robust statement and believes its business is very different from the other eight companies mentioned in the report.

“The FTC report’s intent and focus on consumers is an important step. However, the report lumps very different models into one bucket and paints a broad brush, which might confuse consumers and portray some platforms, like Discord, inaccurately,” said Kate Sheerin, Head of US/Canada Public Policy for Discord.

“The report itself says ‘the business model varies little across these nine companies.’ Discord’s business model is very different—we are a real-time communications platform with strong user privacy controls and no feeds for endless scrolling. At the time of the study, Discord did not run a formal digital advertising service, which is a central pillar of the report. We look forward to sharing more about Discord and how we protect our users.”

We’ll update this post if we hear back from any of the other companies referenced in the FTC report we didn’t hear from on Thursday.