Federal Trade Commission Case Study

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How Effective is the Federal Trade Commission

In the end of last month we saw FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen speak at a panel titled Federal Online Data Security Regulation: Where Are We Going? in which she shed some light on the agency 's approach towards enforcing data security.

She stated that while the Federal Trade Commision simply doesn 't have the time to investigate every reported breach it has a remarkable 70% closure rate in prosecuting data security cases. Ohlhausen also admitted that the data security program of the FTC is not perfect, elaborating that the agency closes a case after it has deemed the company 's security as good, or at least reasonable. This is due to the nature of the rapidly evolving technological …show more content…

Last year the Commision determined that the PCI certification didn 't demonstrate reasonable security in the case of an incident involving ID theft protection company LifeLock. The company was under order since 2010, when it settled a complaint about exaggerated advertising claims. LifeLock was ordered to pay $100 million in December in order to settle Federal Trade Commission contempt charges for violating the terms of the 2010 court order.

Still, Ohlhausen claimed that the Commission lacked convincing evidence of a breach and thinks that the FTC approached the situation from the wrong angle. This is the reason for which the agency is trying to learn more about PCI-DSS and it has already requested information from nine PCI certification companies on how they carry out audits and the assessment process which determines who can get certified.

The Federal Trade Commision and the Federal Communications Commission have had their differences over the matter of who has jurisdiction to privacy. In 2015, the FCC reclassified broadband and as a common carrier service, proposing privacy and data security rules only applying to broadband internet service providers. The FTC responded with a bipartisan 36-page comment, arguing that the FCC 's proposal would under protect some information and overprotect other