Items tagged with FTC
We've all seen those annoying "Warranty Void if Removed" stickers on electronics. They're normally either slapped over a screw silo or wrapped around where two pieces of metal/plastic join together to discourage you (or a third party) from opening up the device to tinker with it yourself. Well, the Federal Trade...
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Bad news for AT&T and good news for consumers at large—the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) does in fact have authority over the wireless carrier and other common carriers, an appeals court has determined. That means the FTC can dole out punishment to AT&T Mobility for throttling data on its unlimited data...
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Apple and Qualcomm are continuing to fight it out in court over patents and the huge sums of money that go along with licensing them for use in mobile devices today. The most recent turn of events in the Qualcomm vs. Apple case in courts right now came this week when U.S. Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins hit Apple...
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Lenovo had its name drug through the mud back in 2015, and its problems were no doubt self-inflicted. The company was caught preinstalling Superfish adware on hundreds of thousands of its computers that were sold to customers, which was part of an effort to line its pockets with an additional revenue...
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Silicon Valley is pushing back against Washington D.C., and for good reason. A lobbying group representing tech titans such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Microsoft recently released a document in favor of net neutrality. The Internet Association (IA) indicated that it supported the 2015 Open Internet...
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Apple leveled some pretty serious allegations against Qualcomm earlier this year, citing anticompetitive licensing practices (among other things). The Cupertino, California-based company likened Qualcomm’s practices to extortion and asked for $1 billion in payments that were allegedly withheld.
“Qualcomm built its...
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Many American congressman are determined to overturn the “midnight regulations” of the previous administration. The United States Senate’s latest bill proposal would reverse the Federal Communications Commission’s rules and allow ISPs to share private data without the consent of the consumer.
Senator Jeff Flake of...
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Vizio has agreed to pay a $2.2 million fine after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and New Jersey Attorney General busted the company for using its internet-connected Smart TVs to automatically track the viewing habits of 11 million customers on a continual basis. The information gleaned from customers was then...
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Two more robocallers have bitten the dust. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has just filed complaints against two robocall organizations that have allegedly helped to make billions of robocalls between March 2009 through May 2016. Many of the calls were to numbers on the “Do Not Call” Registry.
The two main...
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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed a lawsuit against D-Link alleging that the company's failure to properly secure its line of wireless routers and webcams left thousands of customers "vulnerable to a range" of cyber attacks, including those that turned customers' PCs into major parts of numerous botnets. It...
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Is this real life or an Orwellian nightmare? You might want to think twice before purchasing a MyFriend Cayla or i-Que Robot. The smart toys have been accused of sending information to the Massachusetts-based company Nuance Communication. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Campaign for a...
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Earlier this week, WhatsApp made the surprising move to begin sharing user information with its parent company, Facebook. WhatsApp's original stated goal was to know “as little about you as possible”, but that mantra seems to have been thrown out the window in an effort to further increases Facebook’s booming mobile...
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When it comes to the often slow pace of security updates being pushed to the mobile devices that are at center of our daily digital lives, both the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are looking for some answers. The FCC is taking U.S. wireless carriers (like AT&T, Verizon...
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There have been several high profile security breaches over the last couple of years, and in many instances, cyber thieves were able to extract personal information of their target's customers. Usually this resulted in the company offering a free year of identity theft protection to those affected, though in the...
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The Federal Trade Commission has left its stamp on the crowdfunding scene by taking legal action against Erik Chevalier, the Kickstarter project creator who raised more than $122,000 funds from 1,246 backers to produce a board game called The Doom That Came to Atlantic City. In the end, it was the backers who were doomed, as the project was
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Give RadioShack credit, the iconic electronics chain lasted nearly a century and survived part of the Internet era before ultimately filing for bankruptcy. However, the chain's impressive 94-year run doesn't give it a free pass to treat customer data like an asset, or so that's the stance the Federal Trade Commission...
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The FTC has just laid the smackdown on yet another company that's been found guilty of exploiting mobile users without their knowledge. The FTC found that the company, called Nomi Technologies, even went against its own privacy policy mere months after it promised not to, in late 2012.
Nomi's business model...
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As we’ve shown in the past, the FTC doesn’t take too kindly to “unlimited” data plans that are anything but. Companies like AT&T and Verizon Wireless still honor grandfather unlimited data plans, and in the past have throttled customers once they reached a certain threshold (5GB in the case of customers on AT&T’s...
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Dish Network is in hot water with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for outright violating the agency's Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR), including the "Do Not Call" registry, by placing tens of millions of unsolicited calls to numbers that appear on the list. In all, Dish Network and its retail partners made some...
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AT&T agreed to settle with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to the tune of $105 million in early October for its part in a “cramming” scheme that bilked customers out of millions of dollars. Cramming refers to any unauthorized charges on a customer’s cell phone bill, and typically come in the form of unsolicited...
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Following an investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Google has agreed to refund at minimum $19 million to Android users for unauthorized in-app purchases. The search giant has already begun sending out emails to potentially affected individuals, which includes people who have made at least one...
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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is bringing the legal hammer down on tech support scammers who trick people into thinking there's something wrong with their computer that they're able to fix, or otherwise offering to speed up your PC. What they're really doing is charging for services that aren't necessary, though...
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