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A12 TECHNOLOGY
Friday 10 June 2022
FTC Chair Khan plans key work on kids’

data privacy online

By MARCY GORDON
AP Business Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) —
The head of the Federal
Trade Commission says the
agency is pushing a robust
agenda of actions and
policies to help safeguard
children’s privacy online.
The ongoing work will in-
clude toughened enforce-
ment of a long-standing
law governing kids’ online
privacy and eyeing the
algorithms used by social
media platforms targeting Lina Khan, nominee for Commissioner of the Federal Trade
young people. Commission (FTC), speaks during a Senate Committee on
“Children’s privacy is enor- Commerce, Science, and Transportation confirmation hearing,
mously important and we April 21, 2021 on Capitol Hill in Washington. Associated Press
want to make sure we’re
doing everything we can young people. known as Weight Watch-
... to vigorously protect chil- The FTC recently warned ers, in a settlement to de-
dren’s privacy and protect that it will crack down on lete information illegally
them from data abuses,” education-technology collected from children un-
said Lina Khan, who has companies if they illegally der 13 as well as algorithms
led the consumer-protec- surveil children when they developed by the com-
tion agency for a year. She go online to learn. The pany’s weight-loss app for
spoke in an interview over agency noted that it is children as young as eight.
Zoom with The Associated against the law for com- The company also paid a
Press on Wednesday. panies to force parents “to $1.5 million penalty.
Around the country, par- surrender their childrens’ President Joe Biden
ents’ concern has deep- privacy rights in order to stunned official Wash-
ened over the impact do schoolwork online or at- ington about a year ago
of social media on kids. tend class remotely.” when he installed Khan,
Frances Haugen, a former Khan said Wednesday an energetic critic of Big
Facebook data scientist, the FTC had heard com- Tech then teaching law,
stunned Congress and the plaints from parents who, as head of the FTC. That
public last fall when she when the pandemic struck signaled a tough govern-
brought to light internal in 2020, had to suddenly ment stance toward giants
company research show- make that choice. Facebook (its parent now
ing apparent serious harm The so-called edtech com- is called Meta Platforms),
to some teens from Face- panies have apps and Google, Amazon and Ap-
book’s Instagram platform. websites that are used by ple, which already have
Those revelations were fol- hundreds of thousands of been under pressure from
lowed by senators grilling students in school districts Congress, state attorneys
executives from YouTube, around the country. The general and European
TikTok and Snapchat about children’s online privacy regulators.
what they’re doing to en- law prohibits companies At 33, Khan is the young-
sure young users’ safety in from requiring that children est chair in the 107-year
the wake of suicides and provide more information history of the FTC, an inde-
other harms to teens at- than is needed, and re- pendent agency with five
tributed by their parents stricts using students’ per- commissioners and around
to their usage of the plat- sonal data for marketing 1,200 employees.
forms. purposes. She carried intellectual
The recent tide of mass Among a host of other heft, though, that trans-
shootings has also high- enforcement actions, the lated into political traction.
lighted the power of social FTC in March required Khan burst onto the anti-
media and its influence on WW International, formerly trust scene in 2017 with her
massive scholarly work as
a Yale law student, “Ama-
zon’s Antitrust Paradox.”
She helped lay the founda-
tion for a new way of look-
ing at antitrust law beyond
the impact of big-com-
pany market dominance
on consumer prices. That
school of thought appears
to have had a heavy influ-
ence on Biden. q