A good bit of fanfare surrounded the Obama Administration’s release of its Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights in late February. The publication reflects the Administration’s efforts to improve online consumer privacy protections while not stifling the growth of the Internet industries. The document is entitled, “Consumer Data Privacy in a Networked World: A Framework for [...]

Pomegranate juice maker POM Wonderful has declared victory against the FTC . . . in spite of an administrative law judge’s ruling that upholds many claims in the agency’s complaint. But the California company has good reason to celebrate: certain FTC standards, the ones that POM cried foul on, were rejected by the court. The [...]

Whether you or not you are an avid gamer, you have probably realized that a significant segment of the general population takes gaming quite seriously. Probably a little too seriously sometimes. It seems that the ending to the popular game Mass Effect 3 (“ME3”), which is produced by BioWare, disappointed many devoted players so much [...]

The world is full of surprises, like the fact that Nutella chocolate spread is loaded with saturated fat and sugar and is not itself healthy. Ferrero USA, Inc., the company that makes Nutella, learned the hard way that many American parents could not survive (nor perhaps could their children) without the aid and intervention of [...]

SOPA and PIPA, as legislative efforts to deal with online piracy and other infringing activity, have gone the way of the Edsel. But their next of kin, a new bill known as CISPA, has made it through the House, passing 248 to 168. It too seems unlikely to become law, as the White House has [...]

The Federal Trade Commission has obtained an order from the federal court for the Central District of California for a preliminary injunction and asset freeze against all the defendants in an alleged mortgage modification scam. The complaint was filed against California-based Sameer Lakhany and a number of related corporate entities for violating the Federal Trade [...]

For more than a decade, the Federal Trade Commission has been releasing its list of the top ten categories of consumer complaints received by the agency in the previous year. This list always serves as a good indication of the areas toward which the FTC may choose to direct its resources and increase its scrutiny. [...]

When hackers breached the computer systems of online retailer Zappos.com in January, they gained access to the personal information of up to 24 million customers. The information included customer names, billing and shipping addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers. In a predictable response, customers immediately filed federal class action lawsuits against Zappos, and the attorneys [...]

The data free-for-all that’s been enjoyed by the app industry is over … more or less. No longer should the industry expect to collect and use customer data – so accessible and abundant in smartphones and tablets – without notice to its customers. Since the Path fiasco (and the revelation of other major data collection [...]

There may be a legal hurdle or two for the Consumer Financial Protection Board to jump after the recess appointment of agency director Richard Cordray (the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the matter on February 15). But the consumer protection agency created under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act of 2010 is pressing [...]