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A Blog About FTC regulations and happenings

Much excitement surrounds the 2018 Farm Bill – the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018 – which President Trump recently signed into law. The hubbub is all about hemp. The new law removes hemp from the Controlled Substances Act and opens markets across the fifty states to hemp and its many derivatives. Farmers and product manufactures are no longer hogtied by an antiquated prohibition from the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act that made hemp (a subtype of cannabis) illegal. Hemp has many uses, from textiles to protein-rich edibles. But the most popular and profitable use of the plant is hemp-derived cannabinoid oil (CBD oil). The ostensible therapeutic properties of CBD oils have made hemp an industry contender for wellness products, with consumer sales topping $350 million in 2017… and that was before passage of the Agricultural Improvement Act, when CBD oil inhabited a legal gray area. With the Farm Bill developments, the FDA has signaled that it is looking for “pathways” to soften its stance on cannabis-based products. The FDA currently prohibits companies... Read more

Make room Europe: California is taking on the data privacy challenge. For the last year or so, the privacy world has been abuzz with how to implement the E.U.’s General Data Protection Regulation. The buzz died down once GDPR went into effect in late May. But no rest for the weary. A little over a… Read More

More consumers are adopting cryptocurrency than ever, but regulators are less enthusiastic. As a result, cryptocurrency exchanges spend unnecessary time and resources working to comply with outdated guidelines. Kraken, which oversees $150 million in daily cryptocurrency transactions, is the latest exchange to experience this problem. In an effort to bring itself into compliance with current… Read More

In a ruling announced today, the Supreme Court held that online businesses can be subjected to sales tax even in states where they do not have any brick-and-mortar operations. The case, South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., overturns longstanding precedent requiring “physical presence” to subject a seller to state sales tax, representing a big change for… Read More

  On June 6, 2018, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit issued a landmark ruling in LabMD v. Federal Trade Commission. While the Eleventh Circuit impliedly held that the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) has authority to take enforcement action against companies whose unfair practices lead to data security incidents that pose… Read More

A public service announcement of yesteryear posed the following question to parents: “It’s 8:00. Do you know where your children are?” Today’s technology allows parents to answer that question regardless of the time of day. That technology, however, has recently drawn scrutiny for violating the parental notice and consent provisions of the Federal Trade Commission’s… Read More

The FTC is reported to be joining state and international regulators in examining Cambridge Analytica’s actions with data accessed from Facebook, including how the data analytics company obtained the information, what it did with the information, and whether Facebook complied with existing obligations, including a 2012 FTC consent decree. The situation underscores the importance of… Read More

Full Metal Cryptojacket
February 28, 2018

Full Metal Cryptojacket

By: James Trusty

In retrospect, it all seems so predictable. International capitalism creates virtual currencies. Banks are avoided. Millennials hail a new world order of anonymous or nearly untraceable market transactions. Numerous parties and exchanges hold on to large quantities of virtual currencies. But then the bad guys show up. And I’m not talking about the regulators. Last month, in what looks like the… Read More