ftc

Customers of HSBC, Bank of America, and Washington Mutual suffer the highest rates of identity theft in the banking industry, according to an investigative study released Wednesday by a UC Berkeley Law School researcher.

The Federal Trade Commission received over 245,000 reports of identity theft in 2006, but does not typically publish the names of the financial firms and companies listed in the reports. Through an extensive Freedom of Information Act request, Chris Hoofnagle, a staff attorney at UC Berkeley's Boalt School of Law, was able to get detailed records on the individual consumer complaints.

Hoofnagle received detailed … Read more

The US patent system is a morass of ill-begotten gains and poor oversight. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), however, has offered up a slight ray of hope, swatting down N-Data's attempts to milk excessive amounts of cash from its IP:

In an unusually broad exercise of power by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), patent enforcement company Negotiated Data Solutions (N-Data) has been ordered to stop allegedly anticompetitive enforcement of its patents covering the communications technology....

"We [the FTC] recognize that some may criticize the Commission for broadly (but appropriately) applying our unfairness authority to stop the conduct alleged … Read more

A zealous band of pro-regulation privacy groups made a valiant effort a few days ago to convince the Feds to forcibly pull the plug on a new feature on the Ask.com search engine.

The groups, which include the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy, told the Federal Trade Commission on Saturday that a formal injunction was necessary to halt some supposedly pernicious practices on the part of Ask.com.

The only problem? Those supposedly pernicious practices don't actually exist.

Ask.com already had voluntarily changed the way it handled its new privacy feature weeks … Read more

Federal Trade Commission regulators said Thursday that Google's controversial $3.1 billion merger proposal with DoubleClick can proceed, despite earlier complaints raised by competitors and privacy advocates.

FTC regulators have been reviewing the proposed merger for months for possible antitrust violations, after Google announced plans in April to acquire the online ad serving company.

"After carefully reviewing the evidence, we have concluded that Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick is unlikely to substantially lessen competition" in the online advertising space, the commissioners wrote in their majority statement.

The vote was 4-1, with Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour issuing … Read more

In the seemingly waning days of the U.S. government's antitrust review of the Google-DoubleClick union, consumer groups are lodging a last-minute plea: don't forget about privacy.

That was the message during a conference call with reporters Tuesday morning hosted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy.

The directors of those groups, who predicted a decision by the Federal Trade Commission is "imminent," voiced concern that the FTC may overlook the potential privacy implications raised by the combined user massive data stores of the two prominent companies. (The two Washington-based groups, … Read more

Updated at 3:00 p.m. PST with additional legal ethics expert opinion.

FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras said Friday that she will not recuse herself from hearing the Google-DoubleClick merger case, arguing that the fact her husband's law firm is representing DoubleClick doesn't merit her recusal.

In a statement posted Friday to the FTC's Web site, Majoras said that her husband's law firm, Jones Day, is not representing DoubleClick before the FTC and noted that her husband is no longer an equity partner in the firm, meaning that his pay will in no way be … Read more

A political controversy over deleted documents and conflicts of interest could, opponents of the deal hope, imperil Google's planned $3.1 billion acquisition of the DoubleClick advertising firm.

The most recent round started with my colleague Elinor Mills' article on Wednesday afternoon, which noted that two liberal groups opposed to the merger asked Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras to recuse herself from a vote because her husband is a partner at the Jones Day law firm, which is representing DoubleClick. Majoras recused herself from a previous matter involving Procter & Gamble because Jones Day was involved.

That … Read more

WASHINGTON--A first principle of Internet regulation is that what's routinely done in the offline world should be OK when done online. A second principle is that if a company discloses that it's going to do something like review your search history when displaying ads, and then follows through, that should be permitted.

Keep these principles in mind when evaluating some of the overheated proposals bubbling up during the Federal Trade Commission's two-day meeting this week about online privacy.

Here are two ideas that have been floated:

Creating a "Do Not Track" list. The proposal from … Read more