ftc

The FTC has settled its two-year-old lawsuit against keylogger vendor CyberSpy, allowing the company to continue to sell its RemoteSpy product but placing a few conditions on its use.

Announcing the settlement Thursday, the Federal Trade Commission said it "put the brakes" on the business practices of CyberSpy Software, which was sued by the FTC in 2008 over the sale and advertising of its RemoteSpy keylogger software.

Promoted as a computer monitoring product, RemoteSpy can capture keystrokes, passwords, and other information from unsuspecting users. The FTC had alleged that CyberSpy violated the FTC Act by allowing customers to … Read more

Two of Google's chief congressional critics on Wednesday called on federal regulators to investigate whether the search company's inadvertent collection of Street View Wi-Fi data violates the law.

In a letter to Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz, they prod the agency to evaluate whether accidental capture of brief snippets of Wi-Fi traffic is an "unfair or deceptive act" that has harmed consumers.

On Friday, Google acknowledged that its Street View cars had unintentionally intercepted fragments of data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks for periods of 200 milliseconds at a time. Google's blog post said it … Read more

A CBS News investigation last month found that nearly every digital copier built after 2002 stores an image of documents copied, scanned or e-mailed by the machine on hard drives. CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian reports parents and students at Dos Palos High School in California found out the hard way recently, when CBS affiliate KOVR pulled hundreds of student names, home addresses, cell phone and Social Security numbers off the hard drive of an old school copier.

"The fact that information that we treat very, very carefully somehow got out of our system and is out … Read more

Google's bid to convince federal regulators that Apple's iAds plan represents healthy competition seems to be paying off.

The New York Times reported Tuesday that the Federal Trade Commission extended the amount of time it needed to review Google's proposed acquisition of AdMob in order to review Apple's plans for mobile advertising. The extension is supposed to last through the end of this week, after which point the agency could finally be ready to make a decision.

It's seemed pretty obvious for months that the FTC was looking for a showdown over Google's bid … Read more

Google spent more than $250 million on a total of 10 acquisitions during the first quarter of the year, putting it on quite a pace for 2010.

Most of the individual companies that Google buys are pretty small, and sell for prices low enough that Google doesn't have to disclose how much it paid because the price isn't material to its business. However, Google revealed the total amount spent in the first quarter as $268 million in its quarterly filing with the SEC Wednesday.

Of those 10 companies purchased by Google over the last three months, specific details … Read more

Dun DUN! Police break down the door of a Gizmodo editor's house looking for evidence of some sort of crime involving the lost iPhone prototype ... meanwhile, Nokia has to kind of pathetically blog about how someone took a prototype of the Nokia N8 and they would really, really like it back. It's a weird world out there. Also, the "Boy Genius" has been outed, Samsung might make a Google TV, and we're storing your data for you in Unicorn Town.

Sen. Charles Schumer of New York has come out swinging against new announcements by Facebook that modify how much member data is shared with third-party companies, suggesting that the Federal Trade Commission needs to promptly address the issue of social-network privacy.

A press release from Schumer's office announced that he has written to the FTC to ask that the agency "examine the privacy disclosures of social-networking sites to ensure they are not misleading or fail to fully disclose the extent to which they share information...(and) provide guidelines for use of private information and prohibit access without user … Read more

The Federal Trade Commission is inching closer to a decision on whether to challenge Google's pending acquisition of AdMob.

Staff members inside the regulatory group have been asked to start preparing for the possibility of action against Google, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. That doesn't mean they are necessarily planning to take action, but the move--coming weeks after reports that AdMob competitors were being asked to weigh in on the deal--shows that the FTC clearly hasn't decided against it, either.

Last year, Google agreed to pay $750 million for AdMob, a leading provider … Read more

It's our five-year anniversary today, and wow, is that a long time. We've been here longer than the iPhone (rumors of a Verizon phone announced in June), almost as long as it took the U.S. House to ask the FTC to investigate Google Buzz, and about how long it will take Verizon to actually deliver the Android 2.1 rollout to Droid users.

Two new iPhones coming: one for Verizon http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304370304575152242601774892.html http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/29/wsj-apple-developing-new-iphone-plus-another-for-verizon/ … Read more