The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has determined that a number of major social media and streaming companies engaged in “vast surveillance” of their users.

The FTC detailed its findings in a report released today. Officials prepared the report based on records supplied by Google LLC, Amazon.com Inc., Snap Inc., Discord Inc., X Corp., Reddit Inc., ByteDance Ltd. and multiple Meta Platforms Inc. units. The FTC collected the information through 6(b) orders, regulatory tools that the agency uses to study industries where there may be risks to consumers or market competition.

“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,” said FTC Chair Lina Khan.

The first issue that today’s report flags relates to the manner in which some tech giants collect user data. According to the FTC, certain market players use intrusive data collection methods such as tracking pixels. A tracking pixel is a code snippet that a company embeds into webpages to detect when consumers interact with them.

The FTC report also takes issue with the fact that some tech giants indefinitely retain parts of the user data they collect. In addition to the information that companies collect themselves, the retained data includes records sourced from third parties. In some cases, information about non-users is swooped up as well. 

The commission has determined that tech giants don’t always perform so-called data minimization on the records they gather. This is the practice of ensuring that a system doesn’t collect more user information than is strictly necessary for the task it performs. Limiting the amount of personal data that a system stores not only improves privacy but also reduces cybersecurity risks: the information it contains, the less can be stolen by hackers in the event of a breach. 

The FTC has identified other privacy issues as well. One is that there were cases when consumers “had little or no way to opt out” of online platforms’ data collection. In addition, officials found that tech giants sometimes fail to remove all the information they have on file about consumers after receiving data deletion requests.

Another section of the FTC’s report focuses on online risks to children and teens. According to the agency, the social media and streaming companies that it evaluated failed to adequately mitigate those risks on their services.

The report goes on to present a set of recommendations for addressing the issues identified by FTC officials. The agency is asking tech giants to limit the amount of consumer data they collect, delete this data when it’s no longer needed and scale back information sharing with third parties. Additionally, the report argues that Congress should pass federal privacy legislation to “limit surveillance, address baseline protections and grant consumers data rights.” 

Photo: John Taylor/Flickr