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Today's Topics:
1. US Federal Trade Commission Says Social Media Platforms
Engage in Vast-Surveillance of Users (Stephen Loosley)
2. Re: US Federal Trade Commission Says Social Media Platforms
Engage in Vast-Surveillance of Users (Roger Clarke)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2024 22:55:17 +0930
From: Stephen Loosley <[email protected]>
To: "link" <[email protected]>
Subject: [LINK] US Federal Trade Commission Says Social Media
Platforms Engage in Vast-Surveillance of Users
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
FTC Says Social Media Platforms Engage in Vast-Surveillance of Users
A scathing new report takes aim directly at Big Tech and alleged violations of
privacy.
By Matt Novak September 19, 2024
https://gizmodo.com/ftc-says-social-media-platforms-engage-in-vast-surveillance-of-users-2000500840
[Photo caption: Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), during
a Bloomberg News interview in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Sept 26, 2023.]
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 Chairperson Lina
Khan to be fired before, just wait until this report properly trickles through
Silicon Valley today.
The FTC issued a warning letter to nine social media and video streaming
services back in late 2020 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 the
report on Thursday 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 is
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 Childrens
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
peoples 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 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.
?Google has the strictest privacy policies in our industry?we never sell
peoples personal information and we do not use sensitive information to serve
ads,? Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said over email. ?We prohibit ad
personalization for users under 18 and we don?t personalize ads to anyone
watching made-for-kids content on YouTube.?
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 that the business model varies little across these nine
companies. Discords 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 will update this post if we hear back from any of the other companies
referenced in the FTC report we did not hear from on Thursday.
--
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Sat, 21 Sep 2024 06:50:29 +1000
From: Roger Clarke <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [LINK] US Federal Trade Commission Says Social Media
Platforms Engage in Vast-Surveillance of Users
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Thanks for posting, Stephen.
Here are my rueful remarks on the privacy list:
[ Fully a quarter-century back, I published an article in Communications
of the ACM entitled 'Internet Privacy Concerns Confirm the Case for
Intervention': http://rogerclarke.com/DV/CACM99.html
[ A couple of years later, Al Qaeda took down the Twin Towers, natsec
extremism has held sway ever since, and corporations have fed the
surveillance beast, converted the Web from client-driven to
server-dominated, hoovered up data, and monetised it.
[ But it's nice to see that US regulators, who are generally even more
friendly to corporate interests than their Australian counterparts, have
given up pretending that self-regulation achieves anything at all:
> ... these surveillance practices can endanger people?s privacy,
threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a host of harms, from
identify theft to stalking ...
> ... self-regulation is not the answer ... the FTC says Congress
should pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation to limit
surveillance and give consumers rights over their data ...
[ Too late. Digital Surveillance Economy corporations are so powerful
that no US Administration is likely to be prepared to rein them in.
Eric Schmidt wanted corporatised government, and we're nearly there. ]
Clarke R. (2019) 'Risks Inherent in the Digital Surveillance Economy: A
Research Agenda' Journal of Information Technology 34,1 (Mar 2019)
59-80, at http://www.rogerclarke.com/EC/DSE.html
Greenleaf G. et al. (2019) 'Digital platforms: The need to restrict
surveillance capitalism' Submission to the ACCC, Australian Privacy
Foundation, February 2019, at
http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/SSRN-id3341044.pdf
________
FTC Says Social Media Platforms Engage in ?Vast Surveillance? of Users
A scathing new report takes aim directly at Big Tech and alleged
violations of privacy.
Matt Novak
Gizmodo
September 20, 2024
https://gizmodo.com/ftc-says-social-media-platforms-engage-in-vast-surveillance-of-users-2000500840
________
Roger Clarke mailto:[email protected]
T: +61 2 6288 6916 http://www.xamax.com.au http://www.rogerclarke.com
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
Visiting Professorial Fellow UNSW Law & Justice
Visiting Professor in Computer Science Australian National University
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