MilConsumer Blog Feed

The FTC has been hard at work over the past few years. Part of the agency's mission has been to build internal muscles to better anticipate how existing and emerging technologies can harm consumers and competition. This is why the FTC established the Office of Technology (OT), a first in the agency's 110-year history. OT's work has become an indelible part of the agency, an acknowledgment of how deeply technology is ingrained across the economy...

Any marketer will tell you: great storytelling sells. Whether your product is a sports drink, a service, or a videogame loot box, the more your ads draw people in, the more likely it is they’ll buy whatever you’re selling. But, especially when you're marketing to kids and teens, you need to think carefully about your design practices. Consider today’s proposed settlement, filed by the Department of Justice on the FTC’s behalf, where the FTC...

Today, the FTC released a staff report with OT staff’s findings from the agency’s study into large AI Partnerships and Investments. The last two years have seen the creation or expansion of three partnerships between the largest cloud service providers (“CSPs”) and prominent AI developers: Microsoft-OpenAI, Amazon-Anthropic, and Google-Anthropic. These partnerships have included more than $20 billion in cumulative financial investment [1] and...

If you’re in the property management business, you know an important part of the job is reviewing and checking for compliance with regulations covering everything from the terms of your rental agreements to unit habitability. And for good reason. For most people, housing is their largest expense. The FTC’s action against Greystar is an important reminder to include consumer protection laws on your compliance checklist. Here’s what to know. The...

Your customers’ information is valuable – to you and them. But, if you’re considering selling or sharing people’s information, you need to hit the brakes and consider what your customers understand about what information you are collecting from them and sharing with third parties. Because permission to collect information for your business purposes isn’t necessarily permission to sell that information. Consider today’s settlement with General...

On Monday I leave the FTC after eight wonderful years, most recently leading the Bureau of Consumer Protection. I cannot imagine more fulfilling work. Consumer protection has been my passion since law school, when I advocated for families fighting to stay in their homes after the financial crisis. That experience taught me the importance of a muscular government – one ready to take on powerful interests to protect people from economic abuses...

Today, staff of the Bureau of Competition published four reports covering fiscal years 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 on the types and terms of the pharmaceutical patent settlement agreements filed with the FTC under the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 (“MMA”). The MMA requires brand drug and generic manufacturers (and since October 2018, biologic and biosimilar manufacturers) to file certain types of patent...

Today, FTC staff released initial insights from the Surveillance Pricing 6(b) study, highlighting findings that intermediaries have access to a wide swath of data types and data sources (including direct consumer data, inferred data, and first- or third-party sources) to power tools that can influence the price a consumer or audience sees. While there is still much more work to do, the agency continues to proactively learn from and engage...

Your website is one of your business’s most important sales and marketing tools. It’s your brand in a nutshell, your virtual storefront, and a repository for data – yours and your customers’. So, when you go looking for a web host – the company that’ll store your site on its servers – security is non-negotiable. Today’s settlement with GoDaddy, one of the largest web hosting companies in the world, shows what can happen when security slips. Read...

It’s a persistent problem the FTC’s aggressive enforcement program’s been fighting for decades: we’re talking about companies and programs that lure in entrepreneurs, investors, or participants with promises of significant earnings, and then fail to deliver. Today the FTC announced proposed rulemakings to strengthen the agency’s tools to curb deceptive earnings claims in industries where reports indicate they are pervasive: money-making...