Federal Trade Commission Privacy Law and Policy (FTCPL&P) is my 2016 book on the FTC. It is really two books. The first part details the agency’s consumer protection history from its founding, and in so doing, it sets the context for the FTC’s powers and how it is apt to apply them. The book has an institutional analysis discussing the internal dynamics that shape agency behavior. It details how the FTC policed advertising with treatments of substantiation, the Chicago School debates, the problem of advertising to children, and the Reagan revolution. The second part of the book explains the FTC’s approach to privacy in different contexts (online privacy, security, financial, children’s, marketing, and international). One thesis of the book is that the FTC has adapted its decades of advertising law cases to the problem of privacy. There are advantages and disadvantages to the advertising law approach, but do understand that if you are a privacy lawyer, you are really an advertising law lawyer 🙂
FTCPL&P has been reviewed in the Journal of Economic Literature, the ABA Antitrust Source, the European Data Protection Law Review, World Competition, and the International Journal of Constitutional Law. offers comprehensive consulting, management, design, and research solutions. Every architectural endeavor is an opportunity to shape the future
FTC Posts
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The Effective Commissioner
It is unclear what the “right stuff” is for being a Commissioner. Highly-qualified candidates are sometimes duds but those without economic or legal training can shine (e.g. Chairman Steiger, or the secondary-school educated Commissioner Hurley). While political patronage is often bemoaned, all Commissioners are political to some extent, and strongly connected ones are often very…
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President Kennedy: Consumer Bill of Rights, March 15, 1962
To the Congress of the United States: Consumers, by definition, include us all. They are the largest economic group in the economy, affecting and affected by almost every public and private economic decision. Two-thirds of all spending in the economy is by consumers. But they are the only important group in the economy who are…
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A Shape Shifting Agency
Professor Gerald Berk described the FTC as a product of “creative syncretism.” Berk explaind: “those who built regulated competition were successful precisely because they reached across historical, institutional, and cultural boundaries to find resources, which they creatively recombined in experiments in business regulation, public administration, accounting and trade associations.”[1] The result was an entity with…
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A Masked Man Testifies…on Debt Collection
[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” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”] When a witness testifies before Congress using a pseudonym and wearing a mask, it might mean trouble for an industry. In a March 1976 hearing, a “James Clark” testified to his…
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Marketing Miasma and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
In a June 1999 House Committee markup session of the bill that passed as the GLBA, financial service industry lobbyists expected Democrats to raise privacy issues, but thought that Republicans would successfully oppose adding privacy provisions to the bill. An earlier attempt by Democratic Representative Ed Markey of Massachusetts in May had failed on a…
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An Agency Like None Before it in American History, Sans Furniture
[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” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”] On this day 100 years ago, the Commission addressed an important matter–obtaining used furniture from the White House.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
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Complaints from Competitors
[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” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”] The author has heard a rumor that many (a source said almost all) privacy cases come about from complaints by competitors. If that is the case, it’s nothing new. Competitors have…
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On Puffing
“Puffing,” the expression of the seller’s subjective opinion of a product—usually embellished with superlatives—is a kind of falsity considered not to be misleading in American law. Puffing is ubiquitous in advertising, consider such claims such as “The Ultimate Driving Machine.” Puffing cannot include facts, and as such, the law assumes that consumers do not incorporate…
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The FTC’s First Privacy Case: Unfair Information Collection in 1951
In defending the FTC’s jurisdiction and record on privacy matters, Commissioner Ohlhausen recently argued that the FTC has a long history in policing privacy–it brought cases even pre-internet. Commercial espionage was among the turn-of-the-century problems that the FTC was created to address. The FTC brought several matters in the 1910s, including a 1918 matter where it…
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The Limits of Privacy Self Defense in 1918
What does FTC history tell us about hacking back and taking action to engage in privacy self-defense? Back in 1918, it issued a cease and desist order against a company that dealt with nosy competitors by crashing delivery trucks into them. The FTC ordered the company to stop “causing any of [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″…
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Should the FTC Give Advice?
The FTC first met this week 100 years ago. On its fourth day operation (and again a week later), representatives of the coal industry appeared before the assembled commissioners to request an informal meeting. This was the beginning of the FTC as advice-giving body. A month later, the Dean of the Business School of Harvard…
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Happy 100th, FTC
On Tuesday, March 16, 1915, the FTC met in its first session. Not much happened on that first day. DC Supreme Court Justice J. Harry Covington administered the oath to the first five Commissioners, Joseph E. Davies, Edward N. Hurley, William J. Harris, Will H. Perry, and George Rublee. Rublee, although never confirmed by the…