FTC: Mass surveillance conducted by social media, video streaming services

Amazon, Meta, YouTube, ByteDance, and five other major social media and video streaming service providers have collected and tracked users’ and non-users’ personal information, demographic details, behaviors, and interests, which helped generate comprehensive consumer profiles that were later sold to data brokers, reports CyberScoop.

Aside from failing to remove data from former users, most of the said platforms also had no safeguards for data belonging to youths ages 13 to 17, according to the Federal Trade Commission. “America’s hands-off approach has produced an enormous ecosystem of data extraction and targeting that takes place largely out of view to consumers… We’ve seen over and over that, when the financial interest in extracting personal information collides with the interest in protecting consumer privacy, consumers lose out,” said Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine. Such a report comes amid the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s approval of the Kids Online Safety Act and Children’s Online Protection Privacy Rule 2.0, which would restrict child and teen data sharing.