Musk’s X poses “serious risk to Americans’ privacy,” advocates warn FTC - Ars Technica
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Ahead of a July 2 deadline to submit public comments, advocates are warning the Federal Trade Commission that it must keep close watch over Elon Musk’s X and firmly reject a recent bid to end the agency’s ongoing audits of the platform’s data handling.
Last month, the FTC posted a notice explaining that X had argued that an FTC order was no longer necessary due to changes Musk had made to the platform.
The initial order came as a penalty after the FTC found that a coding error had caused then-Twitter to improperly share users’ contact information for ad targeting that had initially been submitted for two-factor authentication. Under the order, X is subjected to costly independent audits, and the FTC has authority to demand documents to ensure compliance with data privacy laws without taking additional legal action.
According to X, the order imposes burdensome costs and should be terminated, partly because the company has completely rebranded since Musk took over Twitter. X also argued that the order’s requirements were duplicative since X now faces similar obligations under the European Union’s General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR).
However, 15 privacy and consumer protection advocates—including Demand Progress, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the National Consumers League—co-signed a letter this week refuting all of X’s arguments.
They’re urging the FTC to “unequivocally reject X Corp.’s brazen attempt to escape accountability at the expense of the American people.”
“X Corp.’s petition fails to clear the demanding legal standard necessary to grant the extraordinary action the corporation is requesting,” the letter said. “To the contrary, X Corp. and its current leadership present a serious risk to Americans’ privacy and data security, demonstrating the need for continued” FTC oversight.
X’s AI training and tools raise red flags
Musk’s big argument seems to be that since he’s rebranded Twitter as X, then folded X into SpaceX, that the old Twitter business has been transformed and there is no longer a risk of X’s improper data handling.
However, advocates argued that Musk’s changes to X have only raised additional concerns about the platform’s data handling that should heighten the FTC’s monitoring and are not a cause to terminate it.
Among top concerns, they cited global backlash to Grok, which triggered a lawsuit from three girls who accused X of allowing the chatbot to generate child sex abuse materials (CSAM) and other non-consensual intimate images (NCII). And just last year, “2.8 billion records leaked from the platform,” advocates noted, while Musk was busy managing DOGE efforts to extract “sensitive information” about millions of Americans. They also pointed out that the FTC had already found that Musk “had directed employees to take actions that would have violated” the order, while seeking to give journalists unbridled access to internal data to investigate the so-called “Twitter Files.”
Further, any questions of how much control Musk wants users to have over their data can be answered by X’s controversial decision to collect “hundreds of millions of posts on the X platform” for AI training “without meaningful or explicit user consent,” advocates said. Rather than seek user consent, X merely updated its terms, advocates said, seemingly banking its AI business on users not reading about updates.
According to Cambridge Analytica, “when Musk changed X’s rules to allow AI training on user-generated content, he didn’t invent a new business model. He industrialized the surveillance capitalism business model Cambridge Analytica pioneered: behavioral data at massive scale enables population-level personality modeling.”
Supposedly, Musk’s X business model training Grok on public posts is “identical” to the business model behind one of the biggest data scandals in history, Cambridge Analytica wrote. X’s AI works to “extract maximum behavioral data, build prediction models, sell persuasion capability. Musk just replaced Facebook’s advertising-to-third-parties model with direct AI-deployment-to-Musk-aligned-entities,” their post said.
Opt-out methods are available but “practically invisible,” Cambridge Analytica noted, citing research finding that “73 percent of X users were unaware their tweets trained Grok.”
Cambridge Analytica suggested that many users would likely be creeped out to realize that deleting X posts...