Following allegations that the company violated a 2020 privacy order, the Federal Trade Commission proposed on Wednesday to prevent Facebook parent company Meta from profiting from the children's data.
A third-party assessor allegedly discovered "several gaps and weaknesses in Facebook's privacy program" that posed "substantial risks to the public."
As a condition of the 2020 settlement, which saw Facebook pay a $5 billion civil fine after an FTC inquiry into the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, the corporation agreed to independent evaluations of its improved privacy program. The FTC claims that by continuing to grant app developers access to private user information, Facebook breached a previous 2012 injunction.
According to the FTC, Facebook occasionally lets third-party apps access user data up to mid-2020.
The Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule has been broken, according to the FTC, and Meta is being blamed for misrepresenting parental restrictions in its Messenger Kids program. According to the COPPA Rule, websites cannot collect personal data from children under 13 without their parents' consent. While the company advertised that the app would only let kids talk to contacts that their parents approved, the FTC claimed that in some cases, kids were able to communicate with additional contacts in group chats or group video calls.
The FTC is recommending that the conditions of the 2020 agreement be strengthened in order to impose more limits on businesses. These restrictions would apply to all of Meta's services, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. One of the suggested clauses prohibits the monetization of user data that is under the age of 18. As a result, any information gathered about these users could only be utilized for security purposes, and any information gathered about users who are under 18 could not later be sold for profit.
Until the independent assessor certifies in writing that Meta's privacy program complies fully with the terms of the agreement, the FTC also seeks to impose a halt on the company's ability to introduce new or modified products or services. Any businesses that Meta buys or merges with would also need to comply with the 2020 requirement.
Additionally, the proposal would call for Meta to obtain users' consent before using facial recognition technology in the future.
Meta was given 30 days to reply to the FTC's conclusions by the agency. The Commission will evaluate Meta's response before determining if amending the 2020 directive "is in the public interest or justified by changed conditions of fact or law."
Due to recent resignations, there are currently no Republicans on the Commission's five-member panel, which approved the order to show cause by a vote of 3-0.
Despite Stone's three years of ongoing communication with the FTC regarding their agreement, they never gave him the chance to bring up this novel, completely unheard-of theory.