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FTC Study Finds 'Vast Surveillance' of Social Media Users (nytimes.com) 60

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday it found that several social media and streaming services engaged in a "vast surveillance" of consumers, including minors, collecting and sharing more personal information than most users realized. From a report: The findings come from a study of how nine companies -- including Meta, YouTube and TikTok -- collected and used consumer data. The sites, which mostly offer free services, profited off the data by feeding it into advertising that targets specific users by demographics, according to the report. The companies also failed to protect users, especially children and teens.

The F.T.C. said it began its study nearly four years ago to offer the first holistic look into the opaque business practices of some of the biggest online platforms that have created multibillion-dollar ad businesses using consumer data. The agency said the report showed the need for federal privacy legislation and restrictions on how companies collect and use data. "Surveillance practices can endanger people's privacy, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a host of harms, from identify theft to stalking," said Lina Kahn, the F.T.C.'s chair, in a statement.
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FTC Study Finds 'Vast Surveillance' of Social Media Users More

FTC Study Finds 'Vast Surveillance' of Social Media Users

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  • Color me shocked (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Snotnose ( 212196 ) on Thursday September 19, 2024 @09:42AM (#64799637)
    Never mind this is the whole business model.
  • ...surprise...

  • Honestly (Score:3)

    by Malay2bowman ( 10422660 ) on Thursday September 19, 2024 @09:50AM (#64799657)
    This really isn't news anymore. Mass scooping up of data has become normalized. Also, there is this little thing about what's posted on social media being accessable to the general public.
    • it never was news

      • it never was news

        Really? In just one social media company, Cambridge Analytica is a household name. There’s been plenty of data harvesting news/history about Mark “Dumb Fucks” Zuckerberg, including how he gave himself that nickname.

        But hey, we’re just old-fashioned out of touch paranoid “privacy” freaks according to this generation if we’re not standing proud as fellow narcissists shouting from at least three social media platform rooftops 6 times a day. Who am I to argue with?

        • you probably get your political views from social media too...

          • you probably get your political views from social media too...

            A retort like that, only confirms who the hypocrite is. Did “social media” make up Cambridge Analytica, or is my claim indisputable regardless of how you feel? Did Zuckerberg not refer to his first customers as “dumb fucks”? You act as if Mark himself didn’t just recently admit political bias and influence on his platform. By Facebook. How many other indisputables will you deny?

            I would say do better, but there’s a reason Kamala Harris cannot win without shit-talking

          • ... from Truth Social, obviously.

  • Rick Romero's Head asplode (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday September 19, 2024 @09:50AM (#64799659)
    Never in the history of Captain Obvious has anything been this obvious.

    Unless the government is providing service with taxpayer dollars then if you're getting something for free you are the product.

    I'm not normally the paranoid sort but after multiple stories of Facebook listening in on my phone and tracking me even though I never opened the app much less logged into it I've taken to just uninstalling both Facebook and Twitter as soon as I get a new phone. If anyone else pulled half the shit they do, especially Facebook Twitter isn't sophisticated enough to do what Facebook does, they'd be permanently banned from the app stores

    • Never in the history of Captain Obvious has anything been this obvious. Unless the government is providing service with taxpayer dollars then if you're getting something for free you are the product.

      The irony of talking about taxpayer dollars and government providing a service, when social media is now a massive and powerful intelligence gathering tool for government.

      If Facebook ever came close to declaring bankruptcy, you would find the men in black sprinting with briefcases stuffed with cash from every three-letter agency. Even the ones you haven’t heard of yet would come running. Too Big To Fail doesn’t even begin to describe law enforcements reliance on social media now.

      Oh we’re

    • Re:Rick Romero's Head asplode (Score:5, Insightful)

      by anegg ( 1390659 ) on Thursday September 19, 2024 @10:26AM (#64799763)

      The problem isn't isolated to people obviously using "social media" and therefore being public in their behavior in ways that can be collected and monitored.

      Virtually every website that anybody visits has third-party data collection technology installed, either for the purposes of "monetization" of the site's content, or for the purposes of "analytics". A small number of advertising companies, chief among them Google, makes the tools freely available, and virtually everyone who puts up a website uses them, sometimes completely unthinkingly.

      I run a website for a STEM education booster club. I don't put any "analytics" on the site. I had a volunteer, who had web experience from working at a local health care organization, helping out with some of the site material. The very first thing this person did was to add "Google Analytics" to the site. Couldn't even explain why, it was just "what we do" at this person's workplace (a health care company, remember?). I removed it.

      The Age of Web has been great in terms of making more information more easily available to more people than ever before. It has been fantastic at creating a common remote electronic interface to every business that it makes sense to have one. BUT - the behavioral tracking that extends across the entire face of it is wrong. It doesn't even need to be there to sell advertising - lord knows magazines and newspapers were effectively selling ad space for their dead tree products without behavioral tracking.

      Until/unless it becomes illegal in the US to collect personal data and to hold personal data in excess of that needed for the immediate and obvious interaction with a website (i.e., shopping cart and basic customer info for a shopping website, a username for a login website, appointment information for a health care org website, etc.), the behavioral tracking for micro-monetization through "targeted advertising" isn't going to end.

      I'm not fond of solving problems through legislation, I tend towards libertarian in my political views, but this really seems to be a case where a huge societal good is being made very bad and won't get better absent a law to eliminate the bad behavior.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        Never shop for underwear online, because for the next 2 years you'll be inundated with underwear ads on multiple "unrelated" sites. if somebody is watching you browse, they'll eventually ask, "why do you get so many underwear ads?"

        • it is not just shopping. My wife has discovered that when she talks about a topic her phone (Android) apparently is listening because suddenly afterwards she is inundated with adverts for anything related to what she was talking about! At least that's what she tells me.

      • Exactly, and this tracking is dangerous too. It's being used by your least favorite political party to manipulate people into supporting bad candidates and bad laws, and even on occasion to rile up dangerous mobs.

  • I am a white middle-aged man who doesn't drive and I keep getting ads for giant trucks and makeup for fat ladies.
    I also get ads for Swiffer mops but I never clean my place either...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mspohr ( 589790 )

      You're not getting the message.
      Maybe you should start driving a giant truck and start wearing fat lady makeup.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      > and makeup for fat ladies.

      and you look faaabulous in it!

      By the way, how is makeup for skinny ladies different than that for fat ladies?

    • I deliberately manipulate the system, clicking the occasional ad that doesn't' interest me at all, hovering my mouse on other ads. I would much rather see ads for things that don't interest me, as those won't influence my behavior.
    • My experience is totally different. For me, the ads are shockingly targeted. And I'm 100% convinced that my phone is actually listening to me. If I'm driving alone in my car and I say "I think I'll buy an otter painting for my wall", the next day my ad feed is covered in ads for otter posters, otter statues, painting lessons, three other types of art, two different types of wall decorations, and the otter exhibit at the local zoo.

      But, they all totally swear that nobody has access to the mic on my phone.
    • Yeah. It's advertising fraud. When I was on Instagram a few years ago they put ads for industrial excavating machines, tractors, heavy heavy equipment that you would use to dig the Panama Canal... Stuff that would cost millions of dollars. I'm not sure where I was going to put it in my apartment. So Facebook/IG should know that I have neither millions of dollars nor the appetite for industrial excavators.

      It's advertising fraud to juice the numbers when they show the advertisers the engagement reports.

      No one
    • hold it!!! are you me?

      Naw, couldn't be. I am an old guy, not middle-aged... and I do not get makeup ads, but I do get a lot of right-wing nutjob stuff put in my feed... I am guessing that somehow the algorithms that rule the world have determined I am A) old and B) white so they think that stuff interests me.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • It's confirmed! (Score:3)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Thursday September 19, 2024 @10:02AM (#64799697)

    The FTC discovers reality at the pace of an asthmatic sloth.

  • How about the FTC crack down on all those data breaches that ALREADY are violation of the laws, and make each company liable for any and all damages consumers suffer as a result!

    That would go a very long way for data privacy rather than new regulations on data when they still don't enforce the ones currently in use.

  • The US needs laws protecting privacy.

    Oh, and the government needs reminded of the requirement for a warrant, before violating your privacy. The founders didn't know about electronics, but they certainly would have included them under "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects".

  • The main reason we don't have these level of privacy laws is that it helps law enforcement. It might be illegal for law enforcement to surveil you; but not for the private sector doing it for profit. So they either purchase the data or subpoena it.

    "We didn't collect that data. We're not the ones that violated privacy; the user gave that information up to the private company."

    If the constitution doesn't allow the government to do it; then you do it through the private sector. When they don't do what you want

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by anegg ( 1390659 )

      It is possible that this is an underlying reason why it will be an uphill better to get a citizen protection law banning the collection of all but necessary personal information on websites. But that doesn't mean it can't happen. The government isn't that fond of encryption for the people, either, but didn't manage to squelch it either.

      The problem might be that this requires the government to act, where the spread of encryption required that the government not act. Getting the government to trip over it

  • RIP Lisa Kahn, head of the FTC, found dead tomorrow of auto-erotic self-asphixiation You served your country well.

  • I would love targeted ads, if... (Score:3)

    by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Thursday September 19, 2024 @10:31AM (#64799783)

    ...they weren't so incredibly stupid

    Here's what I want.
    When I'm in the market for a product or service, I want all suppliers to send me their best pitch, preferably with lots of technical detail.
    When I make a decision to buy or not, I want ALL pitches to stop.

    What I don't want.
    Endless spam about related products.
    Sending me endlessly repeating ads for stuff I already bought.
    Ads that seem to be worse than random. I once started receiving ads for 3D printers used in dentistry. Evidently, the stupid robot somehow believed I was a dental lab.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sinij ( 911942 )
      You fundamentally misunderstand marketing. The ultimate goal and what they are working toward is to have your state of being altered where you desire to consume their product must be satiated. In other words, it is all manipulative. This is because we need very few things outside of bottom tier of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (i.e., food, shelter, clothing). So they try to manipulate higher tiers (i.e., esteem and self-actualization) to get you to consume. Informing you is actually ineffective way to s

    • ... lots of technical detail.

      That stopped being important in the 70s: Then it became what feelings the product invoked (Eg. Anything edible is family/sports/party time.) In short, everything became some level of bling. Buzz-words and some technical details are supplied to demonstrate how modern/powerful the product is. You're not expected to understand the technical details, and marketers don't want the options not installed in the budget model to be obvious holes in their blurb.

  • If they were just categorizing people as an academic excercise it might be odd but harmless. I believe what is happening though is that they are re-enforcing these categorizations through a sort of long feedback loop. If this is true it can't be a good thing to build up societal silos even if it is not the direct cause.

  • The government likes this very much, thank you. Don't expect anything to change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • Who expect that companies run by Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg would do anything other than THE MOST EVIL AND GREEDY THINGS humanly possible.

  • Take facebook for example, I think of the 15min I spent in a single morning on this I had maybe a 25% chance of seeing something from somebody I knew

  • It took them four years to reach this conclusion? Four years? When there are huge swaths of citizens screaming about it constantly?

    God damn, our government is slow as shit. Hopefully in another twenty or thirty years they'll get around to telling congress about it. It'll take congress about another decade to process this new and shocking information.


  • Oh I have nothing to hide so don't mind sharing info on social media.

    Did you know that this data might be used against you when you apply for a job? Governmental position? Influence background checks? Feed advertisers with your socieconomic habits and make you more susceptible to be targeted for influence campaigns? Do sheeple understand they are sometiems being corralled?

    Good for them. Laughing about cat memes, giving their opinion on local schools, politicians, making friends online so networks can ma

  • This is only the tip of the iceberg (Score:4, Informative)

    by Arrogant-Bastard ( 141720 ) on Thursday September 19, 2024 @12:23PM (#64800157)
    All of this data (and metadata) is going into the vast data broker ecosystem -- one of the greediest, sleaziest parts of the Internet. So as bad as what these social media companies are doing is, and as bad as what the advertisers/marketers are doing is, all of it combined doesn't approach the horrible things that data brokers are doing.

    Since I know you'll want some citations for that, here you go: Data Broker Giants Hacked by ID Theft Service — Krebs on Security [krebsonsecurity.com] and Mozilla Drops New Privacy Partner After CEO Found Tethered To Data Brokers | Techdirt [techdirt.com] and Everything We Know About What Data Brokers Know About You - ProPublica [propublica.org] and Wyden: Data Broker Used Abortion Clinic Visitor Location Data To Help Send Targeted Misinformation To Vulnerable Women | Techdirt [techdirt.com] and Data Broker That Trafficked In Abortion Clinic Location Data Also Helps The Air Force With Targeting | Techdirt [techdirt.com] and Data Brokers: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) - YouTube [youtube.com] and Forget A TikTok Ban, We Need To Regulate Data Brokers And Pass A Real Privacy Law | Techdirt [techdirt.com] and Our Ongoing Refusal To Regulate Data Brokers Is Going To Bite Us On The Ass | Techdirt [techdirt.com] SC and Data brokers, in bed with scammers, aimed their algorithms at millions of elderly, vulnerable [substack.com] and 96% Of Hospitals Share Sensitive Visitor Data With Meta, Google, and Data Brokers | Techdirt [techdirt.com] and Data Broker Medbase200 Sold Lists of Rape & Domestic Violence Victims - Slashdot [slashdot.org] and FTC Blocks Data Broker Outlogic From Collecting And Selling Sensitive Location Data | Techdirt [techdirt.com] and Data Brokers Are the Problem | Electronic Frontier Foundation [eff.org] SC and Once More With Feeling: Banning TikTok Doesn’t Do Much If We Don’t Regulate Data Brokers And Pass A Privacy Law | Techdirt [techdirt.com] and Wyden’s Office Gets FTC To Protect The Data Of 1.6 Billion People Tracked By Now-Bankrupt Data Broker | Techdirt [techdirt.com] SC and Biden EO Restricts Sale Of Consumer Data To ‘Countries Of Concern’ (But We Still Need A Privacy Law And To Regulate Data Brokers) | Techdirt [techdirt.com]

    My feeling is that it

  • You Cannot Have Security Without Privacy (Score:3)

    by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Thursday September 19, 2024 @03:46PM (#64800831) Homepage
    The companies that stuffed money into all the politicans' pockets--also failed to regulate itself.

    • ... the FTC is going to do something ...

      The FTC is a type of police: They find the breaches of the law and also issue judgements against the offender. It's not a crime to store a copy of your personal details: In fact, several laws demand it. It's why identity theft is so common.

      There's no US law preventing a business selling the information you had to hand-over. So, the FTC can investigate and publicize behaviour it dislikes, but since a 'crime' hasn't, legally speaking, been committed, the FTC can not punish the not-a-criminal.

      Traditi

  • The solution is paid subscriptions and micropayments. If we can pay for subscriptions to not get advertising we can solve this problem. We would also need micropayments for say a .$08/week subscription. Their should be a law that requires social media co's to offer advertising-free(tracking-free) subscriptions. The government should also create a microcredits system to make paying for these subscriptions affordable since no-one else has made a micro-payments system.

  • I signed up for FB in 2007 or so, when it still looked like an unknown, innocuous and fun website. I never stopped using it via the website only - at first because it was more convenient to use on my computer (big screen and proper keyboard) , then later because one could set your browser to clear all stored data on closing (which I did before and after using FB) and one could also install some adblockers and trackblockers on them (FW they are W). Never installed any Meta app on my phone - not FB, not IG, n

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