If you want to get people really upset, hurt their children. That’s the message from a new spate of complaints about Big Tech.
Last week, a dozen consumer and children’s advocacy groups filed a request for the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate Facebook for alleged deceptive practices following revelations in recently unsealed class action documents that the company had knowingly tried to dupe children into spending large amounts of money in online games. (Facebook employees actually referred to the kids as “whales”, a casino term for high rollers.) Meanwhile, brands such as Nestlé and Disney have stopped buying ads on Google-owned YouTube after paedophiles swamped the comment sections on children’s videos with obscene postings.
The corporate behaviour in question is of course wildly different in the two cases. But the connective tissue is a business model based on the monetisation of user content and data. And that’s the bigger topic that a number of the FTC complainants, most notably Common Sense Media, hope will be addressed by a new piece of California legislation that looks to bring an end to the era in which personal data is treated as a commodity to be freely exploited by platform technology firms.