Blog Posts Tagged with Technology

When uttered by a pirate, “Avast!” is a nautical term for “Listen up and cut it out.” And when the FTC says “Avast!” to software company Avast, it means the same thing. UK-based Avast Limited told...

To turn the old adage on its head, imitation is the insincerest form of falsity. After years of fighting back against scammers who impersonate government agencies and companies, the FTC proposed a...

You may have heard that “data is the new oil”—in other words, data is the critical raw material that drives innovation in tech and business, and like oil, it must be collected at a massive scale and...

At the FTC’s Tech Summit on Artificial Intelligence, Chair Khan previewed how the FTC is using its experience and expertise to establish rules of the road for AI. In her remarks, she noted that “as we...

For consumers already underwater financially and desperate for just $50, cash advance company FloatMe’s services turned out to be more sink than swim. According to the FTC, the subscription-based...

The launch of OT coincided with another type of technology’s rapid growth: Artificial Intelligence. And, on January 25th, OT will hold the FTC Tech Summit on AI to lead discussions among individuals...

Data is at the heart of AI development. Developing AI models can be a resource intensive process, requiring large amounts of data and compute, [1] and not all companies have the capacity to develop...

Thanks to improvements in text-to-speech AI, voice cloning holds promise for consumers, but scammers often find a way to twist tech advancements for their nefarious purposes – and voice cloning is no...

Companies selling genetic testing products tout the benefits of DNA-based insights – learning more about health, lineage, family tree – so that consumers can seek medical attention, customize their...

Rite Aid has “used facial recognition technology in its retail stores without taking reasonable steps to address the risks that its deployment of such technology was likely to result in harm to...

As text-to-speech AI has improved, so has voice cloning technology. The prospects could be promising, but from the FTC’s perspective, voice cloning also presents serious consumer protection concerns...

Today, the FTC is announcing the Voice Cloning Challenge to address the present and emerging harms of artificial intelligence- or “AI”-enabled voice cloning technologies. Speech synthesis has been...

Consumers, businesses, and policy makers have questions about AI, deepfakes, health privacy, and related issues, and the FTC wants to help facilitate an informed public discussion based on the facts...

Even with four months to go, we predict the 2023 Phrase of the Year will be “artificial intelligence.” But like a discount utensil packaged in one of those pale blue gift boxes, some marketers are...

Let’s say someone walks into an old-fashioned record store looking for the Bright Eyes song “False Advertising.” Upon finding and buying the album, she’d have little reason to fear that store...

A common trope crossing the science fiction and mystery genres is a human detective paired with a robot. Think I, Robot, based on the novels of Isaac Asimov, or Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E., a show-within-a...

Generative AI has the potential to rapidly transform the way we live, work, and interact. Within just a few months, generative AI chatbots and applications have launched and scaled across industries...

In the 2014 movie Ex Machina , a robot manipulates someone into freeing it from its confines, resulting in the person being confined instead. The robot was designed to manipulate that person’s...

You may have heard of simulation theory, the notion that nothing is real and we’re all part of a giant computer program. Let’s assume at least for the length of this blog post that this notion is...

A creature is formed of clay. A puppet becomes a boy. A monster rises in a lab. A computer takes over a spaceship. And all manner of robots serve or control us. For generations we’ve told ourselves...