FTC chairman puts Big Tech on notice over EU, UK data privacy demands

The FTC chairman says that U.S. technology companies should not yield to regulatory pressure from the EU and the UK.

Over the past few years, U.S. technology companies have come under increased scrutiny from EU and UK regulators over their business practices and alleged antitrust violations. At the same time, certain requests from European authorities have directly targeted user data privacy and, in some cases, risked weakening data security.

In a letter to more than a dozen U.S. technology companies, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chairman Andrew N. Ferguson underscored their responsibility to safeguard the data of American users, stressing that compliance with European Union or UK regulations must not come at the expense of data security.

"Foreign governments seeking to limit free expression or weaken data security in the United States might count on the fact that companies have an incentive to simplify their operations and legal compliance measures by applying uniform policies across jurisdictions," the FTC chairman said.

The recipients of this letter include: Akamai, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Cloudflare, Discord, GoDaddy, Meta, Microsoft, Signal, Snap, Slack, and X.

The FTC chairman also put the European Union's Digital Services Act and the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act on blast, stating that these laws might incentivize companies to censor worldwide speech and weaken encryption. Ferguson added that censoring Americans at the request of foreign authorities is a violation of the law.

The Trump administration has demonstrated a willingness to intervene, if necessary, to protect American companies from pressure by foreign regulators.

One recent example of efforts to pressure U.S. tech giants into weakening encryption is a request from the UK government, under its Investigatory Powers Act, urging Apple to create an encryption backdoor into its iCloud data. Such a request could potentially grant the UK government access to the encrypted data of all Apple users worldwide.

After months of back-and-forth, the UK government ultimately agreed to drop its demand following pressure from the U.S. The U.S Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced the news on X.