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The Federal Trade Commission alleges that Meta has \u201crepeatedly violated\u201d privacy rules and proposes to tighten the agency\u2019s 2020 order against the company, completely barring it from monetizing data from anyone under 18 in any way, among other new restrictions.<\/p>\n
The order in question took effect in 2020 but was created in 2019 as part of then-Facebook\u2019s $5 billion settlement<\/a> after the company violated a previous<\/em> order. Now the FTC says that Facebook\/Meta has violated the new order, as well as the Children\u2019s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule.<\/p>\n \u201cThe company\u2019s recklessness has put young users at risk, and Facebook needs to answer for its failures,\u201d said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC\u2019s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a news release<\/a>. (Due to the order and said failures spanning both names of the company, both are also used throughout.)<\/p>\n The 2020 order created an independent third-party assessor who would evaluate whether Meta was adhering to the privacy rules, things like having new products go through privacy reviews and restrictions on how facial recognition data and phone numbers are used.<\/p>\n This assessor recently gave the FTC their report, and apparently it is not pretty, containing evidence of numerous shortcomings or violations: \u201cthe Commission notes that the breadth and significance of these deficiencies pose substantial risks to the public,\u201d the agency wrote.<\/p>\n Specifically, Facebook promised (in 2018 \u2014 the timeline is long and confusing) to cut off app developers\u2019 access to users\u2019 data if that user had not used the app in 90 days. But it did not do so, the FTC alleges, and allowed some of that data to be used well into 2020.<\/p>\n