FTC Will Go After Companies That Mine User Data After Changing Policies

AI. I hear that it is a thing these days. In order for that to work, companies need to have data to train their software on. Continuously new data.

What better way to do that than to use the data that you already have collected from your customers.

Some companies are quietly changing their privacy policies from we are not going to mine your data to we are going to mine your data. And, they are doing that quietly.

The FTC says that if a company has a policy that says they are not going to do that and then they change that policy quietly, they are going to go after these companies.

This is actually not new. They went after Hooked on Phonics almost 20 years ago for doing something similar.

The FTC recently went after 1Health for changing its privacy policy retroactively to expand the types of third parties that they shared customer data. They did not get customers’ approval before doing this.

The FTC calls this switching up the rules of the game.

As long as you alert people to the changes in a way that your attorneys say is actual notice (not buried in a 10,000 word privacy policy), you may be okay. But you may not be based on the privacy laws in the states in which your customers live.

Now the FTC is going after companies that use your data in ways that they didn’t tell you about (like mining for AI).

Everyone has been warned. I am sure that many companies will ignore the FTC. They may get away with that. Or, some ticked off consumer might, say, file a complaint with the FTC. I, personally, have done that multiple times. Companies tend to get very religious about the rules after that.

We are not lawyers but if you need help with this, please contact us.

Credit: The Record

by