Summarised by Centrist
The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has revealed that big platforms like Meta, YouTube, and TikTok are collecting heaps of personal data on adults, teens and children.
This “vast surveillance” goes beyond what most users even realise, with companies profiting by selling your data to advertisers.
The FTC study, which looked at nine major companies, found that platforms were vacuuming up everything from your age, income, and marital status to your online habits.
Even if you’re not a user—many companies buy data about you from brokers. While some platforms claim they’ve tightened privacy policies (like Meta making accounts for under-18s private by default), the FTC says self-regulation has been a fail.
Many companies couldn’t tell the FTC just how much data they were collecting.
FTC Chair Lina Khan said, “Surveillance practices can endanger people’s privacy, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a host of harms.”
Despite claims from several companies that user access is restricted to 13 and older, the study found many children on these platforms. Also, the study found teen users were subject to the same invasive data collection techniques as adults.
