Category: History

Historians of consumerism have recognized three waves of consumer movements. The first surrounded the passage of the 1906 food and drug law. The second took hold after the Great Depression and reached its height with the passage of amendments to the FDA Act and the Wheeler–Lea Amendments to the FTC Act. The third was actuated…

The law firm Bryan Cave offers some good advice for companies about consumer complaints to the FTC: …a massive database of consumer complaints known as “Consumer Sentinel” … is used by the FTC and other consumer protection regulators to identify and investigate enforcement targets. [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes”…

Some complain that the FTC’s cases are never litigated and thus are not law. Why are not more FTC cases litigated? The class action suit against Trump University demonstrates one reason. In that case, discovery has turned up calling scripts and the like that portray the organization negatively. Modern businesses, in order to swindle big,…

Many internet business models seem to take advantage of the confusion between online and offline contexts. Social networks make strangers and mere acquaintances your “friends.” Privacy policies borrow from offline norms of confidentiality. Websites have our “trust” yet act in ways that contravene basic principles of the pre-internet idea of trust. My most recent paper…

The shoes are dropping on the companies that assess PCI compliance. Our first signal comes from the LifeLock case. In LifeLock, the FTC alleged that the company “failed to establish and maintain a comprehensive information security program…” as required by a 2010 order. Lifelock settled the case for over $100M, despite the fact that the…

Law360 is featuring an essay from my book on the FTC’s early challenges. Read it here (subscription only). I’ll post the full text in 3 months.

CPDP’s panel on Regulatory Choices and Privacy Consequences featured discussion of Ken Bamberger and Deirdre Mulligan’s Privacy on the Ground and my FTC Privacy Law and Policy books.

Dan Solove has run a Q&A on LinkedIn concerning FTC Privacy Law and Policy featuring 5 things all practitioners should know about the FTC.

Here is a link (free version here) to a Q&A with Bloomberg BNA Privacy & Data Security News Senior Legal Editor Jimmy H. Koo. Thank you, Jimmy for letting me discuss the early history of the FTC and how turn-of-the-century tensions shape how we regulate privacy today. [pdf-embedder url=”https://hoofnagle.berkeley.edu/ftcprivacy/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/newhoofnagleInt.pdf”]

My FTC book should be available tomorrow in Amazon. Meanwhile, Cambridge UP has published the front matter, and index.

I would have chosen a different title for this one, perhaps “Citizens Rejoice! The ‘Libertarians’ Think The FTC Has Lost Credibility.” It is much more about the anti-FTC lobbying rhetoric than specific business practices. The Federal Trade Commission’s strategic enforcement of privacy cases has struck a nerve. The business lobby has responded on the opinion…

This provocative question was posed by Robert Gellman in a 1997 essay that explores the federal Privacy Act of 1974. Gellman concluded that the Privacy Act largely failed to control the expansion of government personal information databases and matching of citizen data among agencies, but compared the act’s failures to the wiretapping law, which he…