Federal Trade Commission

A month after federal regulators ordered it to disclose how its practices affect children and teenagers, TikTok is tightening its privacy practices for the under-18 crowd

Online shopping scams are on the rise as thieves look to take advantage of the increase in people shopping online during the pandemic.

Federal and state authorities say they are cracking down on a wave of illegal schemes that have proliferated during the pandemic and prey upon the desperation of people who have lost jobs in the outbreak’s economic upheaval

Federal agencies and private sector organizations are joining forces to celebrate National “Slam the Scam” Day on Thursday to raise public awareness of government imposter phone scams.

If you were among the 147 million Americans who had their Social Security number and other private information exposed by the 2017 Equifax data breach, the deadline to file a claim for free credit monitoring or compensation is Wednesday.

State and federal authorities are suing imprisoned drug entrepreneur Martin Shkreli over tactics that shielded a profitable drug from competition after a price hike made the so-called “Pharma Bro” infamous

California’s attorney general says he has been investigating Facebook’s privacy practices since 2018.

AT&T will pay $60 million to settle the government’s allegation that it misled customers of unlimited-data plans by slowing down service for heavy users. The Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday that AT&T will automatically provide partial refunds to customers who signed up for unlimited wireless plans before 2011.

AT&T will pay $60 million to settle the government’s allegation that it misled customers of unlimited-data plans by slowing down service for heavy users. The Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday that AT&T will automatically provide partial refunds to customers who signed up for unlimited wireless plans before 2011.

E-cigarette vapor causes lung cancer and potentially bladder cancer in mice, damaging their DNA and leading researchers at New York University to conclude that vaping is likely “very harmful” to humans as well. “It’s foreseeable that if you smoke e-cigarettes, all kinds of disease comes out” over time, Moon-Shong Tang, the study’s lead researcher, said in an interview. “Long term,...

Federal consumer watchdogs have ordered Juul and five other vaping companies to hand over information about how they market e-cigarettes, the government’s latest move targeting the industry. The announcement Thursday from the Federal Trade Commission comes amid a nationwide crackdown on e-cigarettes as politicians and health authorities try to reverse an explosion of underage vaping by U.S. teenagers. The FTC...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed the company’s challenges in two hours of leaked audio from internal meetings published in part by The Verge on Tuesday. The audio from two July Q&A meetings with employees provides a glance into Zuckerberg’s thoughts on key issues facing his company while not under the spotlight of press cameras or a congressional hearing. He also...

A 76-year-old woman was tricked into giving $125,000 to a man who pretended to be in a romantic relationship with her, New Jersey police said.

The Federal Trade Commission is suing Match Group for allegedly using notifications about phony profiles to trick consumers into paying for a subscription to dating site Match.com The site lets people create profiles for free but they need to pay for a subscription to respond to messages. Match sent emails to non-subscribers telling them they had received a response on...

Facebook is tackling a new frontier: love. Facebook Dating, a matchmaking service the company already offers in Brazil, Canada and 17 other countries , will arrive in the U.S. on Thursday. But after years of privacy missteps by the social network, will people trust it with their love lives? The mobile-only feature is part of Facebook’s ongoing attempt to reach...

New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced Friday she is launching an investigation into Facebook for possible antitrust violations. Attorneys general of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and the District of Columbia will join the probe, according to the announcement.

Google-owned YouTube will pay a record $170 million to settle allegations by the Federal Trade Commission and the New York Attorney General that it earned millions for illegally collecting personal information from children without their parents’ consent. Shares of Google parent company Alphabet were up about 0.8% following the announcement.

Telecom companies big and small have reached an agreement with 51 attorneys general to block illegal robocalls from reaching customers’ phones. Attorneys general from North Carolina, New Hampshire and Arkansas announced the deal with 12 phone companies, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint, in a joint news conference Thursday. Carriers that have signed on to the agreement pledge to take...

If you’ve used Facebook’s popular Messenger app, there’s a chance that someone working for Facebook has listened to recordings of your audio chats. A report by Bloomberg found that Facebook has been paying hundreds of outside contractors to transcribe clips of audio from its users, citing “people with knowledge of the work” who were told to transcribe the audio without...