Meta, Amazon, Snap’s Commercial Surveillance Flagged by FTC (2)

The Federal Trade Commission called out the failure of Big Tech’s self-regulation, the ubiquity of commercial surveillance, and the problematic incentives created by the data broker economy in a report released Thursday.

The document is the result of queries sent to nine social media and video streaming services in 2020, which the FTC said was aimed at demystifying their “opaque” data collection practices. The probes targeted Amazon.com Inc., Facebook (now Meta Platforms Inc.), Alphabet Inc.‘s Youtube, Twitter (now X Corp.), Snap Inc., TikTok Inc. parent ByteDance, Discord, Reddit, and Meta’s WhatsApp.

“The tech industry’s monetization ...