The Federal Trade Commission intensified its fight against the tech industry’s biggest companies on Wednesday when it decided to impose a so-called “total ban” on the collection of young people’s personal data by Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

The commission wants to significantly expand the company’s record $5 billion consent from 2020 and said Meta has not fully met the legal obligations it has made to review its privacy practices to better protect its users.

The regulators also said that Meta misled parents about their ability to control who their children communicate with on its Messenger Kids app and misrepresented the access it gave some app developers to users’ personal data.

The proposed changes mark the third time the agency has taken action against the social media giant over privacy concerns.

“The company’s recklessness puts young users at risk,” Samuel Levin, director of the FTC Consumer Protection Bureau, said in a press statement. “Facebook must answer for its failures.”

The FTC’s administrative action, an agency internal procedure called an “order to show cause,” serves as a preliminary warning to the meta that regulators believe the company has violated a 2020 confidentiality agreement. The paper outlines the commission’s allegations against Meta, as well as proposed restrictions.

Meta, which has 30 days to contest an application that was not given prior notice of the FTC’s action.

Following Facebook’s response, the commission said it would consider the company’s arguments and make a decision. The Meta can then appeal the agency’s decision to a federal appeals court.

The FTC’s proposed changes will prevent Meta from profiting from the data it collects from users under 18 and will apply to Meta’s businesses, including Facebook, Instagram and Horizon Worlds, the company’s new virtual reality platform. Regulators want to prevent companies from monetizing this data even after those users turn 18.

This means that Meta may be prevented from using young people’s activity data to show them ads based on their behavior, or to sell them digital goods, such as virtual clothing for their avatars.

Whether the court will approve such changes is unknown. IN statement On Wednesday, Alvaro M. Bedoya, the commissioner who voted in favor of issuing the administrative order, said he had concerns about whether the agency’s proposal to limit the use of Meta young people’s data was sufficiently relevant to the original case.

In a statement, Meta called the FTC’s administrative warning a “political stunt” and said the company had implemented an “industry-leading” privacy program in accordance with an agreement with the FTC. The company vowed to fight the agency’s actions.

“Despite three years of continuous communication with the FTC regarding our agreement, they did not provide an opportunity to discuss this new, completely unprecedented theory,” Meta said in a statement.

Meta has already announced restrictions on targeting ads to users under the age of 18. In 2021, the company said that advertisers will be able to target ads based on the location, age, and gender of minors, but will no longer be able to target ads based on young people’s interests or activity on other websites. And this year, Meta said it would also stop targeting ads. depending on the gender of the minor.

The FTC’s aggressive action is the first time the commission has proposed such a blanket ban on data use to try to protect the privacy of minors online. And it comes amid the biggest government effort to isolate young Americans online since the 1990s, when the commercial internet was still in its infancy.

Fueled by growing concerns about depression in children and the role the online experience could play in exacerbating it, lawmakers in at least two dozen states have introduced bills over the past year that would require certain sites, such as social media, to ban or restrict young people. on their platforms. Regulators are also stepping up their efforts by imposing penalties on online services whose use or misuse of data could put children at risk.

Over the past few years, Meta has been accused by critics of recommending self-harm and extreme dieting content to teenage girls on Instagram, and of failing to adequately protect young users from child sexual exploitation.

The FTC case against the social media giant dates back more than a decade.

In 2011, the agency accused Facebook of deceiving users about privacy. In the agreement, Facebook agreed to implement a comprehensive privacy program, including agreeing not to misrepresent its privacy practices.

But after news reports surfaced in 2018 that voter profiling company Cambridge Analytica had collected data from millions of Facebook users without their knowledge, the Federal Trade Commission cracked down again.

In a consent order signed in 2020, Facebook agreed to restructure its privacy procedures and practices and allow an independent assessor to examine the effectiveness of the company’s privacy program. The company also paid a record $5 billion fine to settle the agency’s charges.

The FTC says Facebook has violated this agreement. In its executive order on Wednesday, the agency cited reports from a privacy assessor, noting that it found “gaps and weaknesses” in the Meta privacy program that require significant additional work.

Although most the report has been edited, it showed that the evaluator found issues with how Meta assessed privacy risks to user data and managed privacy incidents. He also cited Meta’s review of his data sharing arrangements with third parties.

The FTC crackdown on Meta is the latest signal that the agency is delivering on promises by Lina M. Khan, its chairman, to curb the power of the technology industry’s dominant companies. In December, the agency decided to stop consolidating video game makers when sued to try to block Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the company behind the popular Call of Duty franchise.

The FTC has also become more aggressive on privacy regulation. Rather than simply trying to protect consumers from increasingly powerful surveillance tools, regulators are working to ban certain types of data collection and use they consider high-risk.

In December, the FTC accused Epic Games, the company behind the popular game Fornite, of illegally collecting data on children and putting them at risk by matching them with strangers and providing real-time chat. Epic agreed to pay a $520 million fine to settle these and other allegations. The settlement order also required Epic to disable live voice and text chat by default, the first time regulators have introduced such a remedy.

But the data restrictions the agency now wants to place on Meta go much further.

The FTC’s proposed changes would prevent Meta-owned sites and products from monetizing young people’s data. This will allow company platforms such as Horizon Worlds to collect and use information about minors only to provide services to users and for security purposes.

The FTC also wants to block Meta from releasing any new products or features until the company can show written confirmation from an independent privacy assessor that its privacy program is fully compliant with the 2020 consent order.