According to a new report published by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), it was found that Facebook – that has since become Meta, YouTube, WhatsApp, and others – have been highly involved in mass surveillance practices while banking in billions of dollars. The investigation, which began from December 2020, exposed the scale of these platforms’ collection, monetization, and exploitation of personal information belonging to users.
The FTC’s 129-page report exposed how such companies, including Amazon’s Twitch, Reddit, Twitter (now X), and TikTok’s ByteDance, accumulate vast loads of personal data. This data, mainly collected by these services without the full awareness of users, becomes the foundation of many profitable business models-as is often the case with paid-for targeted advertising. Meta reported that 98% of its second-quarter revenue of $39.07 billion came from ads on Facebook and Instagram, which rely on data harvested from users.
Data Collection Beyond Expectation
What perhaps really scarring is the number of data and how that’s amassed. Companies pay for more information from third-party brokers, which includes income levels, location data, and personal interests of users, to create profiles of online behaviour. Such data is used to fine-tune targeted ads while upgrading profitability, yet users are largely unaware of the extent of all these practices.
Lack of User Control
Despite all that is collected, the report comes to the following conclusion: users have
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