Every story tagged FTC, curated for CIOs and IT leaders — ranked by source credibility, engagement, and freshness.
5 stories · open in the command center
The FTC has secured a right-to-repair settlement with John Deere, requiring the company to provide customers access to repair manuals, diagnostic tools, and parts for their equipment. This landmark agreement signals a regulatory shift toward forced interoperability and data access that will likely extend beyond agriculture, creating new compliance obligations and forcing IT organizations to architect systems with third-party access and repairability in mind. For technology leaders, this precedent implies future regulatory requirements to unbundle proprietary systems, open APIs, and support independent service providers—fundamentally challenging current vendor lock-in business models.
Cox Media and affiliated marketing firms were fined $930,000 by the FTC for falsely claiming they could spy on consumers through their phones and devices to target advertisements, when they were actually just reselling data broker email lists at inflated markups. This case underscores critical compliance and reputational risks for IT organizations that handle customer data, as regulators increasingly scrutinize deceptive claims around data capabilities and consumer consent. Technology leaders must ensure their organizations maintain transparency about actual data collection and usage practices, establish robust governance frameworks, and avoid marketing claims that misrepresent capabilities—as regulatory penalties and brand damage can be substantial.
Social media scams cost consumers $2.1 billion in 2025 with losses increasing eightfold, representing a significant cybersecurity and reputational risk for enterprises whose platforms and brands are exploited by scammers. Facebook-based scams accounted for the largest share of losses, with investment and shopping fraud schemes dominating, indicating that IT organizations must strengthen platform security, authentication controls, and fraud detection mechanisms to protect both customers and brand integrity. This surge in social engineering attacks underscores the need for enhanced security architecture, threat intelligence capabilities, and cross-platform monitoring to mitigate enterprise liability and maintain customer trust.
The FTC investigation revealed that OkCupid provided 3 million user photos to AI company Clarifai in 2014 for facial recognition training, violating its own privacy policies, with both companies concealing this data sharing for years. This case highlights critical risks around third-party data sharing partnerships and the long regulatory tail of privacy violations, as the FTC investigation didn't begin until 2019 despite the incident occurring 12 years ago. IT organizations face significant reputational, legal, and compliance risks when data governance controls fail to prevent unauthorized sharing of user data, particularly for AI training purposes.
StubHub's $10 million FTC settlement for deceptive pricing practices highlights the critical importance of regulatory compliance in customer-facing digital systems, particularly around price transparency—a lesson relevant to any organization handling financial transactions. The case demonstrates that even brief compliance lapses (three days) can trigger significant financial penalties and reputational damage, underscoring the need for IT organizations to implement robust controls and real-time monitoring to ensure adherence to evolving regulations like the FTC's pricing disclosure rules. As regulatory scrutiny intensifies across the tech industry, CIOs must prioritize compliance automation and cross-functional governance to mitigate legal and financial risks.