After months of whistleblowers, leaked documents, damning exposes, writs, and indictments against social media, she is now seeking to overhaul privacy laws.
It will shift responsibility for child protection from parents to platforms and bans Instagram and others from using their dark arts to addict youngsters for profit.
Major changes include:
- Forcing Meta, TikTok and others to turn off targeted ads for kids under 13, and
- Banning them from bombarding youngsters’ phones with push notifications.
The New York Times described it as “one of the most significant attempts by the US Government to strengthen consumer privacy in more than a decade”.
The goal is to strengthen America’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, known as COPPA.
Video game companies, toy retailers and digital ad networks would also be subject to the new regulations.
FTC chief Khan said: “Kids must be able to play and learn online without being endlessly tracked by companies looking to hoard and monetise their personal data.
“By requiring firms to better safeguard kids’ data, our proposal places affirmative obligations on service providers and prohibits them from outsourcing their responsibilities to parents.”
Khan has run the FTC for two years and is still just 34.
In that time, she has dragged Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta into court accusing them of being harmful, coercive, exploitative, illegal, exclusionary, inflationary, hurtful, and deg
