Meta Faces FTC Allegations After Putting Child Users at Risk
By Movieguide® Contributor
The FTC is accusing Meta of failing to comply with a 2020 privacy order, misleading users about how their personal information is collected and used, as well as misrepresenting its child safety features.
In 2020, Meta was slammed with a $5 billion fine for failure to provide transparency about its business practices. The company was punished for misleading users about their privacy for years.
The FTC announced on Wednesday that Meta “has failed to fully comply with the [2020] order, misled parents about their ability to control with whom their children communicated through its messenger Kids app, and misrepresented the access it provided some app developers to private user data.”
The announcement also alleges that Meta violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
“Facebook has repeatedly violated its privacy promises,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection said. “The company’s recklessness has put younger users at risk, and Facebook needs to answer for its failures.”
Meta’s response to these allegations has been calling them a political move.
“This is a political stunt,” Meta responded in a statement. “Despite three years of continual engagement with the FTC around our agreement, they provided no opportunity to discuss this new, totally unprecedented theory. Let’s be clear about what the FTC is trying to do: usurp the authority of Congress to set industry-wide standards and instead single out one American company while allowing Chinese companies, like TikTok, to operate without constraint on American soil.”
“FTC Chair Lina Khan’s insistence on using any measure –however baseless— to antagonize American business has reached a new low. We have spent vast resources building and implementing an industry-leading privacy program under the terms of our FTC agreement. We will vigorously fight this action and expect to prevail,” Meta’s statement continued.
The FTC’s allegations center around data revealing that Meta allowed app developers to access users’ private data after promising to cut off access if users had not used those apps in the previous 90 days. In some cases, this access continued into mid-2020.
The new allegations seek to modify and add to the restrictions imposed on Meta in 2020. These changes include: prohibiting monetizing of data of children and teens under 18, extending the company’s compliance with previous agreements onto any company Meta acquires or merges with, and limiting future use of face recognition technology – requiring a user’s explicit consent for future uses of facial recognition.
These changes will better protect users’ privacy, making the platform safer for users, especially for children and teenage users whose private information is currently being used inappropriately.
Movieguide® previously reported on Meta’s misuse of data:
The Texas attorney general’s office recently sued Meta’s Facebook over the app’s use of facial recognition and violations of the state’s privacy protections, the Wall Street Journal first reported.
According to the lawsuit, Facebook used users’ data without their consent. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who filed the suit on Feb. 14, said that Facebook made “tens of millions of violations” under Texas law.
“Facebook has been secretly harvesting Texans’ most personal information—photos and videos—for its own corporate profit,” Mr. Paxton said. “Texas law has prohibited such harvesting without informed consent for over 20 years. While ordinary Texans have been using Facebook to innocently share photos of loved ones with friends and family, we now know that Facebook has been brazenly ignoring Texas law for the last decade.”
Facebook allegedly used photos and videos of users for the past 12 years.
“This is yet another example of Big Tech’s deceitful business practices and it must stop. I will continue to fight for Texans’ privacy and security,” Paxton added in a statement.
A Meta spokesperson said: “These claims are without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”
However, in November, the company announced that it deleted more than a billion people’s information after shutting down a facial recognition system, according to Reuters.
“The scope of Facebook’s misconduct is staggering,” the lawsuit read. “Facebook repeatedly captured Texans’ biometric identifiers without consent not hundreds, or thousands, or millions of times — but billions of times.”
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