FTC Chair Lina Khan explained how Americans have lost their privacy to Big Tech

“In the tech markets, we’ve gone through a couple of decades where we’ve seen over 800 acquisitions by the big five players, none of which have been blocked, and some of the ones that we’ve realized have ended up being unprofitable significant,” Khan said. .

She cited Facebook’s purchase of messaging app WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion as an example.

The FTC sued Facebook in 2020, accusing Mark Zuckerberg’s company of engaging in anti-competitive practices by buying Instagram and WhatsApp. A district judge in Washington, DC, dismissed the complaint in June 2021, saying the agency had not provided enough evidence that Facebook had established a monopoly.

The case was reopened after the FTC filed the complaint a month later. In another motion to dismiss the suit in In April, Facebook, now Meta, said it was facing a lot of competition from rivals like TikTok, X and YouTube. The company also said in a press statement that the FTC reviewed its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp years ago.

“The decision to review the completed transactions is tantamount to announcing that no sale will ever be final,” the company said.

An FTC spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. A Meta spokesman declined to comment.

Khan argued in the “60 Minutes” interview that such purchases have weakened Americans’ privacy guardrails.

“Just to give you a concrete example, there were companies that were giving Americans more privacy and promising that we won’t use your data, we won’t sell it, we won’t spy on it. on you, everywhere all the time,” Khan said. “After some of these firms were bought by one of the big guys, all those data privacy policies changed overnight, so Americans lost those privacy protections.”

In 2021, WhatsApp changed its privacy terms to force users to share their personal data with Facebook. Ireland’s privacy watchdog fined the company $266 million for transparency issues regarding how WhatsApp shared its data with Facebook.

A WhatsApp spokesperson told BI at the time that the company disagreed with the decision and that the penalties were “completely disproportionate”.

Since her appointment by President Joe Biden in 2021, Khan has led an aggressive antitrust fight against big corporations, drawing the ire of Democratic and Republican business leaders. An FTC spokesman told CNN in 2023 that under Khan, the agency had investigated or sued to stop more than three dozen merger proposals.

Some billionaire Democratic donors to Kamala Harris’ campaign, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, have pushed to oust Khan under a potential the new administration. But Khan’s fight has also drawn unlikely supporters from the other side of the aisle, including Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who said in an interview with Newsmax that his party “can’t be whores for big business and can’t be the voice of the working class. at the same time.”

Those supporters called themselves “Khanservators,” The Wall Street Journal reported.