Companies like Google, X, and Meta collect huge amounts of user data, partly to better understand and optimize their platforms, but mostly to sell targeted advertising. Although collecting sensitive information about users' ethnicity, sexuality or other identifiers poses a risk to individuals.
For example, earlier this year, Meta and the US Department of Justice reached a settlement after it was discovered that the company's algorithm allowed advertisers to exclude certain racial groups from seeing ads on topics such as housing, employment and financial services.
In 2018, the company was fined $5 billion, one of the largest in history, after an investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found multiple cases in which the organization did not protect user information, following an investigation into data shared with the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Meta has since modified some of these ad targeting options.
“There is a very close relationship between the data collected about us and the automated tools used by platforms and other services, which often produce discriminatory results, and when that happens, there is no recourse other than litigation.”
Even for users who want to opt out of the voracious data collection, privacy policies remain complicated and vague, and many of them do not have the time or legal knowledge to analyze them.
At best, users can deduce what data will not be collected, “but in any case, the responsibility falls on them, who must scrutinize the policies to try to understand what is really happening with their information. “I am concerned that these corporate practices and policies are so vile and disconcerting that people do not understand what is at stake,”
