Ftc News & Articles

Being true to its settlement agreement with the FTC in March of last year, Google pre-announced yesterday a comprehensive update that consolidates some 60 privacy policy documents, plus a refresh of its terms of service agreement. Both are to begin March 1, but are available now for review online.

This policy shift is generating buzz online over concerns of privacy, search anonymity and control over just what information gets shared.

Facing challenges over its privacy practices -- or lack thereof -- Facebook is reportedly proposing a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission.

What do two former presidential candidates have in common? They are behind The Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011, which "establishes a framework to protect the personal information of all Americans both online and offline." Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) introduced legislation this week that sought to define how companies should handle consumers' personal information both online and offline.

We’ve been following the Federal Trade Commission’s Do Not Track initiative and its progress in Congress. While its outcome is still not known and marketers and customers are still fighting it out over the privacy of their information, online businesses are scrambling to respond.

This week, the mobile enterprise addresses mobile advertising, privacy and the availability of Verizon iPhone 4.

Interested in how information about your online behaviors is collected? Forget Do Not Track or the Privacy Bill of Rights. Instead, look no further than the Advertising Option Icon, which lets consumers make informed choices about online privacy.

Will 2011 be the year that online advertising becomes more transparent? Thanks to a few key initiatives, consumers can expect to have better control over how their data is used online.

We’ve been contemplating the future of web publishing and journalism for sometime now, but recently the Federal Trade Commission decided to weigh in on the debate with a discussion paper that outlines potential policy recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism.

The Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice are looking into the prospect of launching an antitrust inquiry against Apple (news, site) following the company’s ban of developers using non-Apple-sanctioned development tools, according to a story in the New York Post. Filing an inquiry doesn’t necessarily mean that charges would follow, the NYP reports.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• 1.5 Million Facebook IDs For Sale
• Facebook Embracing Local Businesses
• Surprise! Students Are Addicted To Social Media
• FTC May Look Into Social Networking Regulations

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• Foursquare Posts Dramatic Growth
• Google and Privacy Concerns May Affect AdMob Deal
• Facebook Lands Inside Yahoo Mail
• Can Twitter Be A Sustainable Business?

This week the GRC focuses on compliance and inserts a little web publishing for good measure.

Lots of commotion this week. Whether it’s the continuing saga of online advertising revenue or the crackdown on blogger product testimonials, it’s just another day in the world of web publishing.

Lots of social media sites depend on online advertising for most of the revenue generated. Yet, there are many ways to go about integrating ads and targeting them towards specific web users.

Behavioral targeting, a method of compiling data about which sites people visit, what topics they search for and a number of other Web activities to better understand what types of ads might prompt them to make purchases, is relatively common and employed by various publishers and digital enterprises. This approach is now being called into question by consumer groups.