Social media companies collect, share and process vast amounts of information about their users, offering little transparency or control, including over how it is used by systems they incorporate. artificial intelligence (IA), the US Federal Trade Commission said in a report released on Thursday (19).
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The report analyzed how platforms Meta, TikTok by ByteDance, Twitch by Amazon and others manage user data, concluding 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, although their results 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, among other means, said the FTC.
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“While profitable for companies, these surveillance practices can put people’s privacy at risk, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a range of harms, from identity theft to stalking,” said FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan.
Data privacy, especially for children and teens, has been a hot topic. The U.S. House of Representatives is considering bills passed by the Senate in July that aim to address 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 AI technologies. The data deals are infrequently disclosed and often involve private content locked behind paywalls and login screens, with little or no notice to the users who posted it.
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In addition to collecting data on how users interact with their services, most of the companies the FTC reviewed collected users' ages and genders or guessed them based on other information. Some also collected information about users' income, education and family status, the FTC said..
The companies collected data on individuals who did not use their services, and some failed to identify all the ways they collected and used data, the FTC said.
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