The FTC should provide more guidance on what...
The FTC should provide more guidance on what constitutes reasonable steps for protecting user data, TechFreedom President Berin Szoka said during the group’s Thursday event. If the agency is going to use its authority to penalize unfair and deceptive practices…
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on companies that don’t take reasonable steps to protect user data, the FTC should make it clear what steps count as reasonable, he said. Instead, the agency has used “the worst, most ad hoc way to go about that,” leaving companies unclear as to what is required of them, he said. Szoka and panelist Tom Sydnor -- speaking for himself and not in his capacity as Association for Competitive Technology senior intellectual property fellow -- said the FTC should be going after peer-to-peer service Limewire, rather than medical testing firm LabMD, which is facing a data breach case after files containing patient information were accidentally made available through an employee’s desktop, which was running Limewire. The agency should be going after companies that design software intended to trick users into making files on their computers available, Szoka said. “This is a problem the FTC could have solved” by going after Limewire years ago, Sydnor said. “It had multiple chances to stop it … and it didn’t."