Social media companies collect, share and process vast amounts of information about their users, with little transparency or control, including over how that information is used by their artificial intelligence-enabled systems. The Federal Trade Commission said in a report It was released on Thursday.
The report analysed how companies including Meta Platforms, Bytedance's TikTok and Amazon's gaming platform Twitch manage user data, concluding that many of the companies' data management and retention policies are “woefully inadequate”.
The FTC's report also included YouTube, social media Platform X, Snap, Discord and Reddit, but its findings were anonymized and did not reveal the practices of specific companies.
YouTube is owned by Alphabet's Google.
According to the FTC, social media companies collect data through tracking technologies used in online advertising, purchasing information from data brokers, and other means.
“While this surveillance practice is profitable for companies, it also puts people's privacy at risk, threatens their liberties and exposes them to a range of harms, from identity theft to stalking,” FTC Chairman Lina Khan said.
Data privacy has become a major issue, especially for children and teens.
The House is considering a bill passed by the Senate in July aimed at addressing the impact of social media on young people.
Meta also recently introduced teen accounts that incorporate enhanced parental controls.
Meanwhile, big tech companies are clamoring to acquire data sources to train emerging artificial intelligence techniques.
Data transactions are rarely made public and often involve paid content or private content locked behind login screens, with little or no notice to the users who post it.
Most of the companies investigated by the FTC not only collected data about how users interacted with their services, but also collected or inferred users' age and gender based on other information.
Some of the sites also collected information about users' income, education and family status, according to the FTC.
The FTC said the companies collect data on people who don't even use their services, and some fail to fully identify how the data is collected and used.
