: FTC says deceptive rental listings were nothing to write home about lfair September 17, 2018 | 1:03PM FTC says deceptive rental listings were nothing to write home about By Lesley Fair As the song goes, “A house is not a home.” And as alleged in an FTC lawsuit against the operators of rental listing websites , sometimes an apartment isn’t an apartment. Steven Shayan, Kevin Shayan, and affiliated companies run ApartmentHunterz.com, FeaturedRentals.com, and WeTakeSection8.com. For consumers who pay weekly or monthly subscription fees, the defendants promise accurate listings for available units. For example, ApartmentHunterz.com claims its “unique, date-sensitive, rental software updates the listings on a daily basis, so that the data you receive from us is the most accurate and up-to-date information available on the Web today.” Touting “Real-Time Vacant rental listings,” the site purports to feature “over 1,000,000 hourly updated ads” and “over 15,000 exclusive vacant and upcoming listings, giving you the ad[...]
: Letter to Morgan Stanley offers security insights about insiders lfair August 10, 2015 | 3:18PM Letter to Morgan Stanley offers security insights about insiders By Lesley Fair Businesses are understandably concerned about the threat that hackers pose to the security of sensitive data on their networks. But a closing letter the FTC staff sent to Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC warns of another danger lurking closer to home. The FTC staff investigated the allegation that a Morgan Stanley employee had misappropriated information about the company’s wealth management clients. How did the person do it? By allegedly transferring data from Morgan Stanley’s network to a personal website accessed at work, and then onto personal devices. The exported data later showed up on other sites, leaving the information vulnerable to misuse – and exposing Morgan Stanley’s clients to potential harm. The letter lists the staff’s reasons for closing the investigation, including the fact that Morgan Stanley had already implemented [...]
: Clearing out our IN box wfg-adm109 January 19, 2012 | 10:29AM Clearing out our IN box By Lesley Fair We’re glad you’re visiting the BCP Business Center and thanks for your questions. Here are answers to some of your AQs . (Calling them FAQs on a site devoted to truth in advertising doesn’t seem quite right.) I’ve looked everywhere and can’t find the disclosure I’m supposed to add when companies send me products to write about on my blog. Can you tell me the magic words? No — and that’s because there are no magic words. Here’s how it works. Under the FTC’s Endorsement Guides, if there’s a connection between the marketer of the product and a person endorsing the product that would affect how people evaluate the endorsement, it should be disclosed. But no one is suggesting a mandatory “Danger Will Robinson!” neon warning box. What matters is effective communication, not legalese. A disclosure like “Company X sent me [name of product] to try, and here’s what I think about it” gives readers the information they[...]
: Stick with Security: FTC resources for your business lfair October 13, 2017 | 2:10PM Stick with Security: FTC resources for your business By Thomas B. Pahl, Acting Director, FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection In our Stick with Security blog series , we’ve done our best to dive deeper into data security by focusing on the lessons learned from recent cases, insights from closed investigations, and the questions and comments we’ve received from businesses. One remark we’ve heard from companies that want to implement the lessons of Start with Security is “Just give us a list of what to do.” Unfortunately, data security can’t be boiled down to a one-and-done checklist. What’s reasonable depends on the circumstances – for example, the nature of your business and the sensitivity of the information you must collect and maintain – so there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. In addition, data thieves’ tactics are constantly evolving. Last year’s precautions may not protect your company from tomorrow’s threats. That said,[...]