The FTC report published on Thursday looked at the data-gathering practices of Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Discord, Reddit, Amazon, Snap, TikTok and Twitter/X between January 2019 and 31 December 2020. The majority of the companies’ business models incentivized tracking how people engaged with their platforms, collecting their personal data and using it to determine what content and ads users see on their feeds, the report states.
The FTC’s findings validate years of reporting on the depth and breadth of these companies’ tracking practices and call out the tech firms for “vast surveillance of users”. The agency is recommending Congress pass federal privacy regulations based on what it has documented. In particular, the agency is urging lawmakers to recognize that the business models of many of these companies do little to incentivize effective self-regulation or protection of user data
Of course they are.
And I don’t say that in the arched-eyebrow, “And this surprises you?” sort of way, but rather in the supremely exasperated “These fuckin’ guys!” sort of way.
These companies are all terrible, but this shit is never going to stop as long as everyone’s personal data is treated as a free and unprotected resource, ever available to be strip-mined for a profit.
By all means, keep going after this bunch for monopolistic business practices and specific privacy violations. But I continue to believe that only way to really put a stop to this kind of stuff is to fundamentally break the business model of collecting and exploiting personal data
And the way to do that is to make the collection and storage of personal data onerous and expensive for any company that wants to do it. Right now, it is super-cheap for them, so of course they are going to keep doing it.