Feds target data use practices

Dec. 14, 2020 Updated Mon., Dec. 14, 2020 at 8:32 p.m.

WASHINGTON – Federal regulators are ordering Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, TikTok’s parent and five other social media companies to provide detailed information on how they collect and use consumers’ personal data and how their practices affect children and teens.

The Federal Trade Commission’s action announced Monday goes to the heart of the tech industry’s lucrative business model: harvesting data from platform users and making it available to advertisers so they can pinpoint specific consumers to target.

The other five companies are Reddit, Snap, Discord, WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, and Google’s YouTube.

Alphabet offline briefly Monday

A host of Alphabet services, including YouTube, Google Drive and Gmail, were briefly knocked offline early Monday in a widespread outage spanning the tech giant’s major platforms.

Google’s workplace status dashboard showed U.S. outages began at 3:55 a.m. for all of its listed services.

Less than an hour later, the dashboard issued a status message indicating all services were back online.

“We will continue to work towards restoring service for the remaining affected users, but no further updates will be provided,” the message read.

From wire reports

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