A host of prominent American tech firms have been warned not to risk the data and privacy security of US consumers in their compliance with the growing body of UK and European regulations.
US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Andrew Ferguson has written to the leaders of Big Tech firms Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta, as well as cloud and hosting businesses including Cloudflare, Akamai, and GoDaddy.
The letter, also addressed to social media companies Signal, Snap, Slack, Discord and X, ‘reminds’ these tech firms of what the US government sees as their obligation to maintain the rights of Americans against what the FTC describe as ‘pressure from foreign governments to weaken such protections’.
In his politically charged letter, Ferguson wrote: “Because online platforms have become so critical to public discourse, pervasive online censorship in recent years has outraged the American people.
“Not only have Americans been censored and expelled from platforms for uttering opinions and beliefs that were not shared by a small Silicon Valley elite, the previous administration actively worked to encourage such censorship.”
