Our technologists dive into issues at the intersection of technology, consumer protection and competition. The Commission continually develops its expertise in technology to help protect consumers in the 21st Century marketplace.
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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...
Technology Blog
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Earlier this year, the Office of Technology (OT) published a list of research questions and made reference to the long history in mathematics of doling out questions that, as mathematician Paul Erdős...
Technology Blog
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The FTC recently announced a new enforcement action in which it alleged that the data broker Mobilewalla collected and retained sensitive location information from consumers—often without their...
Technology Blog
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Don’t judge a book by its cover – how a technology is named doesn’t tell you how it is used. This is the case with Data Clean Rooms (“DCRs”), which are not rooms, do not clean data, and have...
Technology Blog
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As with previously discussed security principles, many common types of software flaws can be preemptively addressed through systematic and known processes that prevent or minimize the likelihood of...
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The Federal Trade Commission routinely evaluates the privacy representations a company makes against their data handling practices. [1] When discrepancies arise between claim and reality, incorrect...
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For thousands of years, from ancient Mesopotamian markets to the modern-day yard sale, sellers have set their prices based, in part, on who was buying. In these transactions, prices can be targeted...
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The history of traditional open-source software provides a vision of the value that could result from the availability of open-weights AI models – including enabling greater innovation, driving...
Technology Blog
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In March, the Federal Trade Commission hosted the first-ever Technology Forum by the International Competition Network (ICN) members in Washington, D.C. The forum brought together 21 competition...
Technology Blog
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The scientific community has a history of creating and sharing lists of important or interesting questions. The mathematician Paul Erdős, for example, famously doled out his questions to students and...
Technology Blog
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Some say the car a person drives can say a lot about them. As cars get “connected,” this turns out to be truer than many people might have realized. While connectivity can let drivers do things like...
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The FTC’s Tech Summit on AI 1 convened three panels that highlighted different layers of the AI tech stack: hardware and infrastructure, data and models, and consumer-facing applications. This third...
Technology Blog
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The FTC’s Tech Summit on AI [1] convened three panels that each highlighted different layers of the AI tech stack: hardware and infrastructure, data and models, and front-end user applications. This...
Technology Blog
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For more than two decades, the FTC has been bringing enforcement actions for violations of national consumer protection laws due to companies’ poor security practices. These poor practices have...
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Today, the FTC announced four winners of the Voice Cloning Challenge, which was launched to address the present and emerging harms of artificial intelligence, or “AI”-enabled voice cloning...
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The FTC’s Office of Technology (“OT”) was founded in 2023 with the purpose of strengthening and supporting law enforcement investigations and actions, advising and engaging with FTC staff and the...
Technology Blog
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It is increasingly important to use existing legal and enforcement tools in digital and technology cases and develop and implement new or updated tools and approaches to strengthen investigations and...
Technology Blog
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The FTC’s Tech Summit on AI [1] highlighted three panels that reflect different layers of the AI tech stack – hardware and infrastructure, data and models, and front-end user applications. Today, we...
Technology Blog
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Three recent FTC enforcement actions reflect a heightened focus on pervasive extraction and mishandling of consumers’ sensitive personal data. Proposed Settlements with Avast [1] , X-Mode [2] , and...
Technology Blog
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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...
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