The FTC has investigated nine social media and streaming companies. The U.S. regulator believes there should be legislation to curb surveillance by these companies. Users should be given more data rights. Also, these companies should limit the amount of data collected. They also should not collect sensitive data via privacy-invasive tracking methods.
The FTC investigated Amazon, Meta, YouTube, X, Snap, ByteDance, Discord, Reddit and WhatsApp. "The report shows how social media and video streaming companies collect massive amounts of data from Americans to make billions of dollars a year," says Lina Khan of the FTC. "While lucrative for the companies, these surveillance practices compromise people's privacy, threaten their freedoms and expose people to all sorts of bad things, from identity theft to stalking."
The business models of many of the companies surveyed are based on large-scale collection of user data for advertising purposes. Some social media and video streaming companies use privacy-invasive tracking technologies including pixels to collect personal information.
