In a defeat for the Federal Trade Commission, a federal appeals court in New York on Thursday rejected a request to reconsider its earlier decision to clear 1-800 Contacts of antitrust charges involving agreements to restrict search advertising.

"Big technology companies like Facebook should not have free reign to impose their will on the market," Senator Amy Klobuchar says.

"Apple's current path threatens to undermine decades of work by technologists, academics and policy advocates towards strong privacy-preserving measures being the norm across a majority of consumer electronic devices and use cases," states an online petition signed by the New York Public Library and other groups.

Apple famously touts itself as the pro-privacy tech company, but it's rolling out new surveillance software that experts find troubling.