FTC says Facebook violated privacy of children, seeks to block Meta profits

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has gone after Facebook, looking to prevent parent company Meta from profiting off the data of children who use the social media site. On Wednesday, May 3, the FTC proposed a blanket ban in which Meta “would be prohibited from profiting from data it collects, including through its virtual reality products, from users under the age of 18.”

According to the FTC, a third-party review of Meta’s privacy program found the company had violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. The law prevents websites from collecting the private information of users 13 years and younger.

Meta had also violated a 2012 FTC order that barred third-party app developers from receiving access to the Facebook data of children. The FTC said these violations “helped fuel the Cambridge Analytica scandal.”

“Facebook has repeatedly violated its privacy promises,” Samuel Levine, the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement Wednesday. “The company’s recklessness has put young users at risk, and Facebook needs to answer for its failures.”

The FTC proposal would also stop Meta from releasing new products without approval from the independent privacy assessor and put limits on the company’s use of facial recognition technology. While Meta has 30 days to officially respond to the proposal, a company spokesperson has already blasted the proposal in a statement.

“This is a political stunt. Despite three years of continual engagement with the FTC around our agreement, they provided no opportunity to discuss this new, totally unprecedented theory,” Andy Stone said Wednesday. “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.”