The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced updates to the IdentityTheft.gov website aimed at making the site more useful to victims of identity theft. The changes will enable consumers to quickly file complaints and develop a personalized recovery plan after answering a number of questions on the site. “Our hope is that this is going […]
Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
Big Data: FTC Issues Report Cautioning that Use of Big Data may Violate Federal Consumer Protection Laws or Raise Ethical Considerations
On January 6, the FTC issued a report on the commercial use of big data, Big Data: A Tool for Inclusion or Exclusion? Understanding the Issues, summarizing the results of a September 2014 workshop and numerous public comments, including a paper and workshop comments by Alston & Bird Senior Counsel Peter Swire. The report addresses […]
FTC and Wyndham Settle Data Security Allegations
On December 9, 2015, the Federal Trade Commission announced that Wyndham Worldwide Corp., Wyndham Hotel Group LLC, Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, LLC, and Wyndham Hotel Management, Inc. (“Wyndham”) had agreed to settle FTC charges that the company’s security practices unfairly exposed the payment card information of consumers to hackers in three separate data breaches between […]
FTC and FCC Sign Consumer Protection MOU
Since 2014, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has engaged in an increasing number of privacy and data security enforcement actions. The scope of the Commission’s jurisdiction over carriers has also dramatically increased – at least temporarily – following its recent net neutrality order, which reclassified broadband Internet access service as a telecommunications service under Title […]
FTC’s Ability to Regulate Data Security Potentially Limited in FTC v. LabMD
A November 13, 2015 decision from the Federal Trade Commission’s Chief Administrative Law Judge, D. Michael Chappell, calls into question FTC enforcement in the data privacy space. The case began when the FTC filed a complaint on August 28, 2013 after an employee of LabMD, a cancer detection laboratory, downloaded peer-to-peer (“P2P”) software that exposed patient […]