美国联邦贸易委员会研究发现社交媒体用户受到“大规模监视”

【中美创新时报2024 年 9 月 20 日编译讯】（记者温友平编译）美国联邦贸易委员会（FTC）周四表示，它发现几家社交媒体和流媒体服务对包括未成年人在内的消费者进行了“大规模监视”，收集和分享的个人信息比大多数用户意识到的要多。《纽约时报》记者Cecilia Kang对此作了下述报道。

该发现来自一项研究，研究了包括 Meta、YouTube 和 TikTok 在内的九家公司如何收集和使用消费者数据。报告称，这些网站大多提供免费服务，通过将数据输入到针对特定人口统计数据的特定用户的广告中来从中获利。这些公司也未能保护用户，尤其是儿童和青少年。

联邦贸易委员会表示，它近四年前就开始了这项研究，首次全面审视一些最大的在线平台不透明的商业行为，这些平台利用消费者数据创造了价值数十亿美元的广告业务。该机构表示，该报告表明，有必要制定联邦隐私立法，并限制公司收集和使用数据的方式。

“监视行为会危及人们的隐私，威胁他们的自由，并使他们面临从身份盗窃到跟踪等一系列危害，”联邦贸易委员会主席莉娜·汗（Lina Khan ）在一份声明中表示。

科技巨头因侵犯隐私而受到严格审查，近年来，它们被指责是导致年轻人和儿童心理健康危机的部分原因，一些社会科学家和卫生局局长将这一危机归咎于社交媒体和智能手机的泛滥。然而，尽管国会多次提出加强隐私和儿童网络安全保护的提案，但几乎所有监管大型科技公司的立法尝试都失败了。

联邦贸易委员会在其报告中总结道，这些公司自我监管的努力也没有奏效。“自我监管已经失败了，”它补充道。

谷歌发言人 José Castañeda 表示，拥有 YouTube 的谷歌“拥有业内最严格的隐私政策——我们从不出售人们的个人信息，也不会使用敏感信息投放广告”。他补充说：“我们禁止针对 18 岁以下用户进行广告个性化，也不会针对任何在 YouTube 上观看‘为内容而制作’的人进行广告个性化。”

Discord 的美国和加拿大公共政策负责人 Kate Sheerin 在一份声明中表示，FTC 的报告“将非常不同的模式归为一类，并进行了粗略的划分。”她补充说，Discord 不提供正式的数字广告服务。

TikTok 和拥有 Instagram、WhatsApp、Messenger 和 Facebook 的 Meta 未立即回应置评请求。

2020 年 12 月，该机构对运营 13 个平台的 9 家公司展开了调查。 FTC 要求每家公司提供 2019 年至 2020 年运营数据，然后研究这些公司如何收集、使用和保留这些数据。

这项研究包括亚马逊旗下的流媒体平台 Twitch、消息服务 Discord、照片和视频共享应用程序 Snapchat 以及留言板 Reddit。现已更名为 X 的 Twitter 也提供了数据。

该研究没有披露各公司的调查结果。Twitch、Snap、Reddit 和 X 均未立即回应置评请求。

公司辩称，自研究进行以来，他们已经收紧了数据收集政策。本周，Meta 宣布，未来几周内，18 岁以下 Instagram 用户的帐户将默认设为私密，这意味着只有帐户持有人批准的关注者才能看到他们的帖子。

FTC 发现，这些公司贪婪地消耗用户数据，并经常通过数据经纪人购买非用户的信息。他们还从链接到其他服务的帐户收集信息。

大多数公司收集了用户的年龄、性别和语言。许多平台还收集了教育、收入和婚姻状况的信息。该机构表示，这些公司没有为用户提供简单的退出数据收集的方法，而且保留敏感信息的时间往往比消费者预期的要长得多。

这些公司利用数据创建用户档案——通常将他们收集的信息与在其他网站上收集的习惯信息合并——以投放广告。

该机构还发现，许多网站声称他们限制了 13 岁以下用户的访问，但许多儿童仍在使用这些平台。青少年在许多应用程序上也被视为成年人，他们受到与成年人相同的数据收集。

根据这项研究，许多公司无法告诉联邦贸易委员会他们收集了多少数据。

可汗是一名民主党人，他对科技巨头的积极监督赢得了自由派和保守派的一致赞扬。他说，该报告表明公司的做法“可能危及人们的隐私，威胁他们的自由，并使他们面临一系列危害”。她补充说，关于儿童安全的调查结果“尤其令人不安”。

联邦贸易委员会去年提议进行修改以加强儿童隐私法规，立法者正在寻求将儿童隐私保护范围扩大到 18 岁以下的用户。2022 年，可汗启动了一项监管工作，为根据用户浏览或搜索历史展示广告的公司制定规则。

该机构此前曾对多家科技公司提起侵犯隐私的投诉，并于 1 月与 Epic Games 达成 5 亿美元的和解协议，以违反儿童隐私法。2022 年，FTC 因 Twitter 使用用户安全数据进行行为广告而对其处以 1.5 亿美元的罚款。

本文最初发表于《纽约时报》。

题图：美国联邦贸易委员会总部位于华盛顿特区。Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

附原英文报道：

FTC study finds ‘vast surveillance’ of social media users

By Cecilia Kang New York Times,Updated September 19, 2024

The Federal Trade Commission headquarters in Washington, D.C.Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

WASHINGTON — The Federal Trade Commission said Thursday it found that several social media and streaming services engaged in a “vast surveillance” of consumers, including minors, collecting and sharing more personal information than most users realized.

The findings come from a study of how nine companies — including Meta, YouTube, and TikTok — collected and used consumer data. The sites, which mostly offer free services, profited off the data by feeding it into advertising that targets specific users by demographics, according to the report. The companies also failed to protect users, especially children and teens.

The FTC said it began its study nearly four years ago to offer the first holistic look into the opaque business practices of some of the biggest online platforms that have created multibillion-dollar ad businesses using consumer data. The agency said the report showed the need for federal privacy legislation and restrictions on how companies collect and use data.

“Surveillance practices can endanger people’s privacy, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a host of harms, from identify theft to stalking,” said Lina Khan, the FTC’s chair, in a statement.

Tech giants are under intense scrutiny for abuses of privacy and have in recent years been blamed in part for contributing to a mental health crisis among young people and children that has been linked by some social scientists and the surgeon general to the rampant use of social media and smartphones. But despite multiple proposals in Congress for stricter privacy and children’s online safety protections, nearly all legislative attempts at regulating Big Tech have failed.

Efforts by the companies to police themselves also haven’t worked, the FTC concluded in its report. “Self-regulation has been a failure,” it added.

Google, which owns YouTube, “has the strictest privacy policy in our industry — we never sell people’s personal information and we don’t use sensitive information to serve ads,” said José Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google. He added, “We prohibit ad personalization for users under 18 and we don’t personalize ads to anyone watching ‘made for content’ on YouTube.”

Discord’s head of US and Canadian public policy, Kate Sheerin, said in a statement that the FTC’s report “lumps very different models into one bucket and paints a broad brush.” She added that Discord does not run a formal digital advertising service.

TikTok and Meta, which owns Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In December 2020, the agency opened its inquiry into the nine companies that operate 13 platforms. The FTC requested data from each company for operations between 2019 and 2020, and then studied how the companies had collected, used, and retained that data.

Included in the study were the streaming platform Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, the messaging service Discord, the photo- and video-sharing app Snapchat, and the message board Reddit. Twitter, now renamed X, also provided data.

The study did not disclose company-by-company findings. Twitch, Snap, Reddit, and X did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Companies have argued that they have tightened their data collection policies since the studies were conducted. This week, Meta announced that the accounts of Instagram users younger than 18 will be made private by default in the coming weeks, which means that only followers approved by an account holder may see their posts.

The FTC found that the companies voraciously consumed data about users and often bought information about people who weren’t users through data brokers. They also gathered information from accounts linked to other services.

Most of the companies collected the age, gender, and the language spoken by users. Many platforms also obtained information on education, income, and marital status. The companies didn’t give users easy ways to opt out of data collection and often retained sensitive information much longer than consumers would expect, the agency said.

The companies used data to create profiles on users — often merging the information they gathered with information on habits collected on other sites — to serve up ads.

The agency also found that many of the sites claimed they restricted access to users younger than 13, but many children remained on the platforms. Teens were also treated like adults on many of the apps, subjecting them to the same data collection as adults.

Many of the companies couldn’t tell the FTC how much data they were collecting, according to the study.

Khan, a Democrat whose aggressive oversight of the tech giants has drawn plaudits from liberals and conservatives alike, said the report shows how companies’ practices “can endanger people’s privacy, threaten their freedoms and expose them to a host of harms.” The findings on child safety were “especially troubling,” she added.

The FTC last year proposed changes to strengthen child privacy regulations and lawmakers are seeking to raise child privacy protections to users younger than 18. In 2022, Khan opened a regulatory effort to create rules for companies that show advertising based on users’ browsing or search history.

The agency has previously filed complaints against several tech companies for privacy violations and reached a $500 million settlement in January with Epic Games for violating a child privacy law. In 2022, the FTC fined Twitter $150 million for using security data about users for behavioral advertising.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.