Tech@FTC Blog Posts

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Behind the FTC’s 6(b) Report on Large AI Partnerships & Investments sfelder January 17, 2025 | 12:54PM Behind the FTC’s 6(b) Report on Large AI Partnerships & Investments By Office of Technology Staff Today, the FTC released a staff report with OT staff’s findings from the agency’s study into large AI Partnerships and Investments. The last two years have seen the creation or expansion of three pa…

Solving the Traveling Salesman Problem? Not quite, but here are more research questions from the Office of Technology bjames@ftc.gov December 3, 2024 | 12:10PM Solving the Traveling Salesman Problem? Not quite, but here are more research questions from the Office of Technology By Staff at the Office of Technology Earlier this year, the Office of Technology (OT) published a list of research questi…

Unpacking Real Time Bidding through FTC’s case on Mobilewalla bjames@ftc.gov December 3, 2024 | 11:55AM Unpacking Real Time Bidding through FTC’s case on Mobilewalla By Staff in the Office of Technology & Division of Privacy and Identity Protection The FTC recently announced a new enforcement action in which it alleged that the data broker Mobilewalla collected and retained sensitive location inf…

Data Clean Rooms: Separating Fact from Fiction bjames@ftc.gov November 13, 2024 | 8:35AM Data Clean Rooms: Separating Fact from Fiction By Staff in the Office of Technology and the Division of Privacy and Identity Protection 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 clea…

Avoiding Outages and Preventing Widespread System Failures hbarber August 12, 2024 | 12:47PM Avoiding Outages and Preventing Widespread System Failures By Staff at the FTC Widespread software outages can often be prevented. Resilience – a software program's ability to handle and maintain critical functionality in the face of bugs or other unexpected conditions – is essential given the significant…

No, hashing still doesn't make your data anonymous hbarber July 23, 2024 | 3:01PM No, hashing still doesn't make your data anonymous By Staff in the Office of Technology 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 assertions about data identific…

Behind the FTC’s Inquiry into Surveillance Pricing Practices hbarber July 23, 2024 | 8:52AM Behind the FTC’s Inquiry into Surveillance Pricing Practices By FTC Staff Image This photo from a 1945 issue of Radio-Craft magazine shows the inside of a radio Audimeter, a device used to monitor what households were listening to on their radios. This picture gives us a rare peek inside one of the first “…

Global Perspectives from the International Competition Network Tech Forum hbarber June 13, 2024 | 11:59AM Global Perspectives from the International Competition Network Tech Forum By Staff in the Office of Technology 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…

P = NP? Not exactly, but here are some research questions from the Office of Technology. bjames@ftc.gov May 15, 2024 | 8:41AM P = NP? Not exactly, but here are some research questions from the Office of Technology. By Staff in the Office of Technology The scientific community has a history of creating and sharing lists of important or interesting questions. The mathematician Paul Erdős, for examp…

Cars & Consumer Data: On Unlawful Collection & Use bacree May 14, 2024 | 10:08AM Cars & Consumer Data: On Unlawful Collection & Use By Staff in the Office of Technology and The Division of Privacy and Identity Protection 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 dr…

Consumer Facing Applications: A Quote Book from the Tech Summit on AI bacree April 23, 2024 | 10:23AM Consumer Facing Applications: A Quote Book from the Tech Summit on AI By Staff in the Office of Technology 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. Th…

Security Principles: Addressing Vulnerabilities Systematically bjames@ftc.gov April 17, 2024 | 8:08AM Security Principles: Addressing Vulnerabilities Systematically By The Office of Technology 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 included fai…

Approaches to Address AI-enabled Voice Cloning hbarber April 8, 2024 | 8:56AM Approaches to Address AI-enabled Voice Cloning By FTC’s Office of Technology 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 technologies. The FTC received submissions from a wide …

Best Practices in Building Tech Capacity in Law Enforcement Agencies bjames@ftc.gov March 25, 2024 | 3:37PM Best Practices in Building Tech Capacity in Law Enforcement Agencies By The Office of Technology 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 investigation…

Semiconductor Chips & Cloud Computing: A Quote Book bacree March 14, 2024 | 10:15AM Semiconductor Chips & Cloud Computing: A Quote Book By Staff in the Office of Technology 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 publish the first in a thre…