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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On the “Influencers”–Nothing New Under the Sun
Bloomberg reports, FTC to Crack Down on Paid Celebrity Posts That Aren’t Clear Ads. Yes, the FTC is saber-rattling on this issue, with its native ads workshop, statements on the issue, and enforcement actions. And the media coverage runs into the same old arguments. First, “we didn’t intend to mislead.” We’re venturing into a little…
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What if We Are All Just Rectards? On Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers
I have a few friends working at major technology companies who share a similar story—they describe meetings with the founder, always an eccentric, Delphic, creature who gives feedback that is rushed and difficult to understand. The group huddles after meeting with the oracle, attempting to decode his meaning. Some hilarity ensues. Someone among the group…
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How to Read FTCPL&P Without Paying for It
Much of my book is available free or at low cost. The lowest cost option for purchasing is Google Play, which sells it for only $20. You can read the print book free at over 115 academic libraries. If you are a faculty member or student at an academic institution, you might have a subscription…
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On Dan Lyons’ Disrupted
Dan Lyons’ Disrupted, the tell all about a prominent journalist’s experience working at Hubspot, a marketing company, is a train-wreck of a read. I could not put it down and have accomplished little work this week as a result 🙂 Lyons details a hundred examples of plain naïveté and pathology within the company. Lyons comes…
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FTC on the Radio Part 2: Celebrities on Contracts, Advertising, Door-to-Door Sales
Here’s another example of the FTC’s dynamism and innovation—sometime in the early 1970s, it created radio spots to inform consumers of various marketplace problems. This album, titled, Shop Wisely Think Before You Buy, includes tracks (listen below) from: Shirley Jones, Leonard Nimoy, Karen Valentine, Sebastian Cabot, Burt Reynolds, Clu Gulager, Carol Burnett, Lloyd Haynes, and…
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Antonio García Martínez’s Chaos Monkeys and Privacy
Here’s something you may not know: every time you go to Facebook or ESPN.com or wherever, you’re unleashing a mad scramble of money, data, and pixels that involves undersea fiber-optic cables, the world’s best database technologies, and everything that is known about you by greedy strangers. Every. Single. Time. The Federal Trade Commission staff recently…
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FTCPL&P Reviewed in EDPL
Federal Trade Commission Privacy Law and Policy is reviewed in the current issue (Vol. 2, Issue 2) of the European Data Protection Law Review by Professor Alessandro Mantelero. Professor Mantelero says: In his book on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Hoofnagle gives the European reader more than a historical overview of the origins and vicissitudes…
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When the FTC Was Not That Controversial
A historical look at the FTC reveals that it spent decades doing lame work. Just consider the years of “trade practice conferences.” Commissioners would fly all over the country, giving their blessing to self-regulatory agreements on the most trivial of topics. One commissioner famously raved about his post at the FTC to Philip Elman because…
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Big Increase in Civil Penalties at the FTC
News to me–the FTC was required by Congress to adjust civil penalties so that they catch up with inflation. The new maximum is $40,000 per day/per violation (up from $16,000). Interestingly, if fully adjusted for inflation, the maximum would have gone up to $52k for violations of orders, but alas, Congress capped the increase to…
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70% of Security Investigations Closed?
Jeremy Snow of Fedscoop reports that the FTC closes approximately 70% of investigations into information security violations. The figure comes from a speech by Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen. Ohlhausen emphasized that the FTC’s approach overall emphasizes reasonableness. This means that, as Snow reports, “If a company’s security is ‘reasonable, or even good,’ Ohlhausen said, and solves the…
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The Historical Importance of FTC Investigations
Leafing through pages and pages of historical records on the FTC, one is frustrated by both its volume, and by what it is missing. For much of the FTC’s history the agency quietly settled matters with companies using assurances of voluntary compliance (“AVCs”). One result is that there are very interesting docket entries in the…
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The FTC’s Historical–and Enduring–Challenges
Law360 published the “early challenges” essay from FTC Privacy Law and Policy here. Here is the full version in PDF and plain text (below) for those without a Lexis subscription.