Category: History

As Professor Finn Brunton observes, spam evokes strong responses. Dan Balsam, a California lawyer, has made a career of suing spammers and maintains one of the most comprehensive resources for small-claims antispam litigants.14 Balsam and Timothy Walton brought the first consumer spam case that went to trial in California, against a spammer that raised eighteen…

The prolific GULC Professor Rebecca Tushnet comments on 43(B)log on FTC Privacy Law and Policy: This is a detailed, clearly written guide to the FTC, with specific attention to its privacy practices but including an extensive discussion of its overall history and jurisdiction, at least on the consumer protection side; the antitrust side receives much…

Students of the Commission are probably familiar with Robert V. Larabee’s The Federal Trade Commission: A Guide to Sources. My bibliography builds upon Larabee, and includes everything I could find on the FTC’s consumer protection and privacy missions. There are also some difficult to find resources, such as the memo George Rublee used to lobby…

The cover for my book is ready. Many of the books about the FTC use the agency’s iconic horse statuary for the cover. I chose not to use the horses because the meaning of the statuary cannot be interpreted without seeing both statuaries: the version where man punishes business and the one where business bites…

The FTC has released an enforcement policy statement on so called “native” advertising. This development signals that the FTC is about to take cases against advertorials. The FTC probably has even selected characteristics of native ads it wants to bring its first cases against. Expect the first cases to contain violations of all the sections…

I did a short interview with BNA on the Wyndham settlement here.

Here’s a Q&A I did with BNA’s Privacy and Security Law Report on the Wyndham decision. [pdf-embedder url=”https://hoofnagle.berkeley.edu/ftcprivacy/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/hoofnagleInt.pdf”]

My newest article is FTC-relevant. In Native Advertising and Endorsement: Schema, Source-Based Misleadingness, and Omission of Material Facts, my former student, Eduard Meleshinsky and I explain why native advertising may mislead consumers and we present evidence from an experiment where we presented survey respondents with an advertorial. Let me say here that if you are…

The Wyndham case has settled. Here are several observations about the settlement: If Wyndham obtains a clean PCI-DSS assessment, Wyndham enjoys a presumption that it is in compliance with the requirement to have a “comprehensive information security program.” The presumption is important, because it is in effect a safe harbor from civil penalty/contempt actions. The…

For decades, the FTC went into a period of dormancy where the agency appeared to get very little done. Much of the agency’s activity was focused on convening various industries for “Trade Practice Conferences,” where the FTC would oversee the creation of voluntary rules by business leaders. The minutes from the FTC’s activities in the…

I’m in the process of updating my post on TRENDnet. It turns out that the FTC agreed with me that TRENDnet’s initial assessment left something to be desired. The Agency requested that TRENDnet submit a supplemental report, available here. I’m also writing up an essay about Google’s interim assessment report covering 2012-2014, available here [updated…

According to Dissent, in an initial order, the Administrative Law Judge in LabMD dismissed the FTC’s complaint against the company Friday. The FTC should appeal this decision—not to punish LabMD, but rather to clarify its power to pursue matters under the unfairness power. The initial decision is another example of how the FTC is haunted…