Category Archives: Maureen Ohlhausen

Former FTC lawyer: Expect fewer data breach and privacy cases under Ohlhausen

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The Federal Trade Commission’s new chairwoman will focus the agency on economic harm to consumers, meaning there will be fewer cybersecurity and privacy enforcement actions, a former FTC official says. “I think you’ll see a drop off in cases,” former FTC attorney Whitney Merrill told CyberScoop after a presentation she co-hosted at the DEF CON hacker convention in Las Vegas last week. “We can’t deny that’s true.” New Chairwoman Maureen Ohlhausen, a Republican, told a lawyers at conference earlier this year that under her leadership the agency will focus on “objective, concrete harms such as monetary injury” and eschew “speculative injury, or … subjective types of harm.” Most data breaches fall into that latter category. The agency pursues those cases as part of its mission to fight identity theft. “It’s hard to show economic harm,” in data security and privacy breaches, and there hasn’t been much research into it, said Merrill, now an attorney for video game publishers Electronic Arts. […]

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FTC pushed from Hill on hacking of smart toys, kids’ privacy

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Federal cybersecurity and privacy protections for children are not keeping up with the burgeoning data collection engaged in by “smart” toys and online games, Sen. Mark Warner said Monday, asking the Federal Trade Commission if the law needs to be changed. In a letter to acting FTC Chairwoman Maureen Ohlhausen, the senator says he’s concerned the agency is soft-pedaling the dangers the Internet of Things might pose for children, citing a speech she gave earlier this year. “Reports of your statements casting these risks as merely speculative — and dismissing consumer harms that don’t pose “monetary injury or unwarranted health and safety risks” — only deepen my concerns,” the Virginia Democrat wrote. He cites the recent example of CloudPets, a product from Spiral Toys that’s marketed as “a message you can hug.” The company turned out to be storing users’ personal data in an insecure, public-facing online database — reportedly exposing over 800,000 customer logins and passwords and more than 2 million voice recordings […]

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