ftc
FTC crams a major crammer as phone fraud goes global
It’s as much fun to be on the receiving end of a “cramming” as the name suggests. Dodgy companies have long slapped monthly charges on people’s local phone bills thanks to a practice called “LEC billing,” and few phone users notice the charges for months. When they do, it can be difficult to have them removed—and good luck getting a refund.
Continue reading »FTC reminds us that storing data in the cloud has drawbacks
Take Google’s new Nexus One phone as a case study of the pros and cons of storing life details on remote servers. Nexus One phones can back up their complete settings to Google’s servers , including data such as “Wi-Fi passwords, bookmarks, a list of the applications you’ve installed, the words you’ve added to the dictionary used by the onscreen keyboard, and most of the settings that you configure with the Settings application.” Get a new phone and the data transfers easily. But that data is now sitting on servers outside of your control, where it can be accessed far more easily by Google itself, hackers, and law enforcement than it ever could if kept within the device.
Continue reading »FTC threatens fines, jail for online check service operators
The Federal Trade Commission has charged those behind the shady online check service Qchex with contempt, and wants daily fines imposed on them until they give up the ghost. The group has launched a new site—a Qchex clone—with the same questionable policies that made Qchex a “dinner bell for fraudsters.” This has left the FTC fuming, and it wants the site’s operators to quit helping criminals rip people off— now . You may remember Qchex from a court order earlier this year —in February, a US District Court ordered the company to halt its illegal operations and to cough up its ill-gotten gains.
Continue reading »Ad group: FTC blog rules unfairly muzzle online media
The Federal Trade Commission’s new “blogger rules” may be unconstitutional, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The IAB, one of the Internet’s largest advertising organizations, published an open letter to the FTC Friday urging it to rescind the rules because of their “dubious” differentiation between online and offline media and how they dance around the First Amendment protections of the media. The FTC announced its controversial guidelines earlier this month, essentially saying that bloggers must explicitly disclose if they are being compensated by a manufacturer, advertiser, or service provider when they review an item.
Continue reading »FTC forces Sears, Kmart out of the spyware business
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has busted a strange set of spyware purveyors—US retailing giants Sears and Kmart. The FTC this week approved its final consent order against the companies (which share the same owner) over an episode that can only be chalked up to incompetence of a truly epic scope. Sears Holding Management Company decided that it could really use a lot more marketing data to fuel its decision-making process, so it began offering visitors to sears.com and kmart.com a special invite—sign up for “My SHC Community,” download a piece of “research” software, and earn 10 American dollars.
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