ftc - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Businesses face rising political pressure from data breaches

  The data breaches like the one at Target and more recently a unit of credit bureau Experian are fueling consumer protection efforts that could have an impact on business.

• FTC dumps on scammers who blasted millions of text messages

  The Federal Trade Commission today said it has filed eight court cases to stop companies who have sent over 180 million illegal or deceptive text messages to all manner of mobile users in the past year.

• FTC Online Privacy Protection Campaign Kicks Into High Gear

  As the Federal Trade Commission settles with a company involving allegations of a massive data breach that exposed medical records, it continues its work evaluating privacy practices of businesses in the Internet age.

• Big Data Brings Big Privacy Concerns

  Wary of privacy implications of massive data collection systems, the Senate Commerce Committee plans to continue a probe of the industry, coinciding with a separate inquiry underway at the Federal Trade Commission.

• How to get the FTC's attention: Illegally robocall consumers while spoofing the agency's consumer hotline number

  Seems these folks just wanted the Federal Trade Commission to smack them down. The FTC today said it had a federal court shut down an illegal robocall operation that allegedly impersonated the agency in an attempt to trick consumers into turning over all manner of sensitive personal data.

• Antitrust probe could be hard, costly battle for Google

  Google acknowledged on Friday that it has received formal notification of a US Federal Trade Commission review, prompting analysts to say the search company could be in for a long, tiring and expensive battle.

• US authorities investigating Google over antitrust: report

  The US Federal Trade Commission is preparing to serve subpoenas to Google as a first step in a broad antitrust investigation of the search engine and advertising giant, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
  The probe would focus on whether Google is using its search engine to unfairly drive traffic to its growing group of web properties, said the Journal article, citing unnamed sources.
  Representatives of Google and the FTC declined to comment on the report. The information "didn't come from us", said an FTC spokeswoman.
  The European Commission opened its own antitrust investigation into Google in November. The European investigation focused on allegations that Google abused its dominant position in online search to promote its other services, such as price comparison.

• Intel may settle FTC antitrust complaint

  Intel may be close to settling the antitrust lawsuit filed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission late last year.

• Online attack hits US government websites

  A botnet comprised of about 50,000 infected computers has been waging a war against US government websites and causing headaches for businesses in the US and South Korea.