Social media companies collect, share and process vast amounts of data about their users, with little transparency or control over how it is used by systems that incorporate artificial intelligence. The Federal Trade Commission said in a report published on Thursday.
The report looked at how Meta Platforms, ByteDance’s TikTok, Amazon’s Twitch gaming platform and others handle user data, and found that data management and retention policies at many of the companies were “woefully inadequate.”
YouTube, social media platform X, Snap, Discord and Reddit were also included in the FTC report, though its findings were anonymized and did not reveal the companies’ specific practices.
YouTube is owned by Alphabet’s Google.
Social media companies collect data through tracking technologies used in online advertising and by purchasing information from data brokers and other means, the FTC said.
“While lucrative for businesses, these surveillance practices can jeopardize people’s privacy, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a range of harms, from identity theft to harassment,” said FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan.
Data privacy, especially of children and adolescents, has been a hot topic.
The House of Representatives is considering bills passed by the Senate in July aimed at addressing the effects of social media on younger users.
And Meta recently launched teen accounts that incorporate enhanced parental controls.
Meanwhile, big tech companies have been scrambling to acquire data sources to train their emerging artificial intelligence technologies.
Data deals are rarely disclosed and often involve private content locked behind paywalls and login screens, with little or no notice to the users who posted it.
In addition to collecting data on how users interact with their services, most of the companies the FTC reviewed collected users’ age and gender or guessed it based on other information.
Some also collected information about users’ income, education and family status, the FTC said.
The companies collected data on people who did not use their services, and some were unable to identify all the ways they collected and used the data, the FTC said.
