Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, owner of WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, filed a lawsuit this week in Washington, DC challenging the constitutionality of the Federal Trade Commission. The complaint questions FTC’s longstanding structure and processes, including the agency’s administrative proceedings, its executive authority (although it is led by presidentially-nominated and Congressionally-confirmed commissioners), and its authority to protect the privacy rights of American consumers. The consumer protection agency has been operating since 1915.
Meta is attempting to block the FTC’s recent actions to protect children’s privacy against the media conglomerate’s practices. The FTC is proposing to amend a 2022 privacy order with Meta after finding that “the company has failed to fully comply with the order, misled parents about their ability to control with whom their children communicated through its Messenger Kids app, and misrepresented the access it provided some app developers to private user data.” Among other actions, the FTC wants to prevent Meta from profiting from the data the corporation collects on underage users.
