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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Privacy as fourth-wave consumer protection
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…
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Bryan Cave on Consumer Complaints to the FTC
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”…
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One Reason So Many FTC Cases Settle
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,…
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What We Buy When We “Buy Now”
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…
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FTC 6(b)s the PCI Assessors
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…
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The FTC’s Early Challenges
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.
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Video of CPDP Panel on Bamberger and Mulligan and Hoofnagle
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.
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Solove Q&A on LinkedIn
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.
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Q&A in BNA
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”]
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Front Matter, Index Released
My FTC book should be available tomorrow in Amazon. Meanwhile, Cambridge UP has published the front matter, and index.
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Oped in the Hill
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…
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Does privacy law work?
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…