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| FTC Raises Alarm on AI Data Practices Amid Social Media Risks |
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has warned that social media users are losing control of their personal data to artificial intelligence, which is collecting unprecedented amounts of computer-generated information about people's life roles.
In a report on Thursday, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said that social media companies leverage artificial intelligence to collect, share and extract information about users on a massive scale but do so with "significantly less transparency" than other complex software systems which use AI.
Regulators focused on " troublingly lax data management and retention practices" at some companies, including Meta Platforms Inc., TikTok owner ByteDance's Twitch online gaming platform, which is owned by Amazon.
The FTC investigated which firms were doing what, and the results included Reddit, Snapchat, Discord, YouTube, and the social networking website X; however, none of those conclusions singled out individual corporations. Alphabet owns YouTube.
The report relies on processes from 2020, when the website was called Twitter, and which X has improved upon since then, according to a spokesperson for X.
"X respects user data privacy and strives to inform users about what they are sharing with the platform and for what purposes, giving them the option of restricting how much user account info gets gathered just in case," a spokesperson said.
A spokesman said only 1% of X's current U.S. users are aged 13-17.
Such surveillance practices -- lucrative for the businesses involved in them -- have the potential to jeopardize consumers' and Americans' privacy, security, and peace of mind," FTC Chair Lina Khan said.
The FTC looked at what type of information the businesses in question are able to collect about how their customers use their services, as well as user data on age, sex, family status, educational level and income.