Home > News

FTC Accuses Facebook of Violating Privacy Agreement to Protect Children

By Charlie Fripp
Facebook Featured

Social media company Facebook, which falls under Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, is no stranger to controversy. It has come under fire from regulators on several occasions, accusing the technology giant of underhanded business practices and not doing enough to protect users’ privacy.

Tip: tired of Facebook? Learn how to download all of your photos.

Repeated Violations

In one such 2020 ruling, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued Facebook with a privacy order to protect children using Facebook’s Messenger Kids app. As part of the proceedings, Facebook had to pay a $5 billion civil penalty settlement and expand its privacy program. However, the FTC is now accusing Meta of violating the order and proposed several changes to force Meta into taking it seriously.

Through its failure to comply with the 2020 order, the FTC says Meta misled parents about their ability to control with whom their children communicated on the Messenger app and misrepresented the access it provided some app developers to private user data.

Facebook Inline
Image source: Unsplash

“Facebook has repeatedly violated its privacy promises. The company’s recklessness has put young users at risk. And Facebook needs to answer for its failures,” explains Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

In addition to other expanded limitations, the proposed changes stipulate that Meta is prohibited from profiting from data it collects from users under 18. It would also bar the company from using facial recognition for minors and require additional protections for users.

Meta is yet to comment on the accusations and the proposed changes, which it must do within 30 days. The FTC’s Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya also released a statement, calling on Zuckerberg to explain why the Commission shouldn’t modify the original order.

But while Bedoya explains that remedial action should be equal to the transgression, he hints that he can’t make a connection between some of the proposed changes and the alleged repeated violations.

Good to know: learn how to view Instagram, Twitter and Facebook without an account.

Image credit: Unsplash

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Charlie Fripp Avatar
Charlie Fripp
Charlie Fripp is a technology writer with a strong focus on consumer gadgets, video games, and cyber security. He holds an undergraduate degree in professional journalism and has worked as a journalist for over 15 years. In his spare time, he enjoys playing various musical instruments and gardening.

Read next

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.
Explore the historic Roman bridge in lush Salamanca, Spain captured beautifully in daylight.
The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.