ftc

California’s consumer privacy law is a call to action for federal regulators

9 January 2020 by Steve Blum
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Flashers

Federal Trade Commission chair Joseph Simons was on the undercard for Consumer Technology Association CEO Gary Shapiro’s “fireside chats” with federal policymakers at CES in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Warming up the audience ahead of Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai’s long awaited CES debut, he urged congress to give his agency the U.S. privacy cop job that California now holds by default. The FTC is already pursuing privacy enforcement actions under existing law “because the big tech platforms are becoming so consequential to our lives and so large”, Simon said.… More

Five years and two FCCs later, FTC settles data throttling case against AT&T

13 September 2019 by Steve Blum
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The slow motion network neutrality enforcement ping pong match between the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission resulted in a data throttling settlement with AT&T, according to a story by Bevin Fletcher in FierceWireless. The details haven’t been released yet, but if approved by FTC commissioners it would end a dispute over how AT&T manages – throttles – the bandwidth consumed by millions of customers with grandfathered unlimited data plans.

AT&T’s mobile data throttling isn’t limited to legacy all-you-can-eat customers, at least according to research published last year, but the FTC’s enforcement action is limited to legacy data plans that are no longer offered.… More

Big broadband’s permission for, collection and use of customer info gets a federal review

5 April 2019 by Steve Blum
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The privacy practices of four major broadband service providers and one big disruptor are getting a hard look from the Federal Trade Commission. Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Google Fiber were given 45 days to produce detailed information about their business practices and subscribers, with particular emphasis on how they collect information about customers, whether it’s done with genuine permission, and what they do with it.

The information demanded by the FTC includes statistics on how many people actually read privacy policies, along with what promises to be a tall stack of those policies – every single one that’s been written by the companies, including copies that might be “different from the original because of notations on the copy”.… More

Federal online privacy cop needs direction, says GAO study

18 February 2019 by Steve Blum
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Police academy

The federal government’s primary consumer protection agency – the Federal Trade Commission – doesn’t think too hard about policing online privacy violations, according to a report by the General Accounting Office. Generally, the FTC can act when a company engages in unfair or deceptive business practices. Figuring out what’s fair and what’s not in cyberspace is a complete puzzle, and impenetrable terms of service and other digital fine print typically give companies a get out of jail free card to companies, the report notes…

Some stakeholders said that FTC relies more heavily on its authority to take enforcement action against deceptive trade practices compared with the agency’s unfair trade practices authority.

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Charter, Comcast tell FTC to kill California broadband laws

28 August 2018 by Steve Blum
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Comcast and Charter Communications want the Federal Trade Commission to preempt California’s data privacy law, and any other state laws regarding broadband service. In comments filed last week, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA), which serves as a Washington, D.C. lobbying front for Comcast, Charter and other cable companies, ask the FTC to tell state lawmakers and officials that they can’t enforce broadband service rules beyond what federal regulators think is appropriate (h/t to Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica for the pointer)…

The FTC should ensure that the Internet is subject to uniform, consistent federal regulations, including by issuing guidance explicitly setting forth that inconsistent state and local requirements are preempted…

California’s recently enacted California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 imposes numerous requirements that differ from, and even conflict with, federal law.174 Moreover, a patchwork of state-level rules applying only to BIAS providers would undercut existing federal policy basing enforcement on what information is collected and how it is used, rather than on who is collecting the information.

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FTC is everyone's broadband cop, but don't expect a fast response

28 February 2018 by Steve Blum
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The Federal Trade Commission can apply consumer protection laws to broadband service, even when a telephone company is delivering it. A federal appeals court in San Francisco made that clear on Monday when it rejected AT&T’s argument that the FTC’s authority doesn’t extend to telephone companies or other providers that have “common carrier” status.

An earlier ruling, made last year, would have barred the FTC from any oversight role regarding companies with common carrier status, even when the business line involved wasn’t a common carrier service.… More

New broadband top cop talks and walks a narrow beat

11 January 2018 by Steve Blum
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Death threats kept Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai away from CES, but the acting chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Maureen Ohlhausen, sat down for an interview on Tuesday with Consumer Technology Association CEO Gary Shapiro. Her agency is responsible for broadband consumer protection enforcement, after the FCC bucked the job over last month. Appropriately, Shapiro opened with a couple of questions about network neutrality.

Ohlhausen said her concern is transparency – service can be pretty much anything so long as terms are disclosed – and the FTC will look at one basic question: whether consumers get what they’re promised.… More

Can things play by human rules on the Internet?

8 January 2014 by Steve Blum
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The etiquette of things.

“Good practice, when it comes to handling data, is not something new, it’s something we’ve already done well”, said Marc Rogers, an Internet security researcher. “We have to be careful we don’t get paralysed by worrying about exotic threats”. He was speaking on a panel this morning at CES that looked at the need, or not, for regulating the so-called Internet of things (IoT). When a device in a home, a thermostat for example, automatically sends information to a private company – an electric utility, say – it might not be done with the same degree of privacy and consent that’s involved when a person manually enters data on a website.… More