Blog

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...

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...

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...

People often talk about “safety” when discussing the risks of AI causing harm. AI safety means different things to different people, and those looking for a definition here will be disappointed. These discussions can sometimes focus on the possibility of existential risk stemming from some sort of AI agent or cyborg of the future. But speculation about human extinction is well beyond the FTC’s immediate concerns. Instead, the FTC focuses on AI...

Tech support scams can happen to anyone: small business owners, your employees, and family members — especially those over 60, according to reports to the FTC. These scams usually happen when someone searches online, clicks a promising link, and suddenly gets frightening pop-up alerts warning that their computer is infected with malware. The alerts say to call a number to fix it immediately — and that’s when a so-called “tech support professional...

We’ve heard it loud and clear from tens of thousands of people: hidden and misleading fees, also known as junk fees, hurt consumers and businesses. Today the FTC announced it is sending to the Federal Register a bipartisan final rule that will target bait-and-switch pricing and other tactics used to hide and misrepresent total prices and fees for live-event tickets and short-term lodging. What’s the bottom line for covered businesses? Be upfront...

As companies depend on accumulating more consumer data to develop products such as artificial intelligence, targeted advertising, or surveillance pricing tools, they may create valuable pools of information that bad actors can target for illicit gain. While the use of consumer data grows, data breaches and digital threats persist as significant problems – but this does not need to be the status quo. Addressing underlying risks that lead to these...

A job you truly enjoy is a good thing, but if the work feels more like an online game than an actual job, you can bet it’s a scam. Reported losses to job scams increased more than threefold from 2020 to 2023 and, in just the first half of 2024, topped $220 million. [1] Driving this trend are skyrocketing reports about gamified job scams, often called task scams. About 20,000 people reported these scams in the first half of the year, compared to...