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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Technology
Johana Bhuiyan

Social media and online video firms are conducting ‘vast surveillance’ on users, FTC finds

FTC United States Discord Google TikTok Epic Facebook TwitterX
a side-by-side image of Twitter's bird logo and Facebook's thumbs up logo
Twitter/X and Facebook are among the companies alleged to have engaged in mass surveillance, according to a FTC report. Composite: AP, AFP via Getty Images

Social media and online video companies are collecting huge troves of your personal information on and off their websites or apps and sharing it with a wide range of third-party entities, a new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) staff report on nine tech companies confirms.

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.

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