The Trump Federal Trade Commerce Commission deleted four years of commercial guidance blogs on Tuesday morning, including important information on consumer protection related to artificial intelligence and historical confidentiality of the agency under the former president Lina Khan against companies like Amazon and Microsoft. Over 300 blogs have been deleted.
On the FTC website, the page hosting all agencies Blogs and advice related to companies No longer includes any information published during the administration of former President Joe Biden, current and former FTC employees, who spoke under anonymity for fear of reprisals, Tell Wired. These blogs contained FTC advice on how large technological companies could avoid raping consumer protection laws.
A blog now deleted, entitled “Hey, Alexa! What are you doing with my data? “ Explains how, according to two FTC complaints, Amazon and its products from the Safety Camera of the Rings would have taken advantage of the sensitive consumer data to train algorithms of the electronic commerce giant. (Amazon disagreed with FTC complaints.) He also provided advice to companies operating similar products and services. Another article entitled “The FTC $ 20 million establishment tackles the illegal data collection for Microsoft Xbox children: a game changer for COPPA compliance” Inform technological companies on how to comply with the law on the protection of children’s online privacy by using the Microsoft 2023 regulations as an example. The regulations followed allegations of the FTC that Microsoft obtained data Children using Xbox systems without the consent of their parents or tutors.
“With regard to the message to industry on our expectations of compliance, which is in a way the most important part of the application action, they try to simply erase those in history,” said a familiar source in Wired.
Another deleted FTC blog titled “The lure test: AI and consumer confidence engineering” Described how companies could avoid creating chatbots that violate FTC ACT rules against unfair or misleading products. This blog won a price in 2023 For “excellent descriptions of artificial intelligence”.
The Trump administration has received broad support from the technological industry. Large technological companies such as Amazon and Meta as well as technological entrepreneurs like the CEO of Openai, Sam Altman, have all donated to the inauguration fund of Trump. Other leaders of Silicon Valley, such as Elon Musk and David Sacks, officially advise the administration. Musk’s so-called Department of Government (DOGE) uses technologists from Musk technologists. And already, federal agencies such as the General Services Administration have started to deploy AI products like GSAIA cat of general government for general use.
The FTC did not immediately respond to a request for a comment from Wired.
The deletion of blogs raises serious compliance problems under the law on federal files and the Open Government Data Act, Wired A former FTC official said. During the Biden administration, the FTC management would place “warning” labels above the public decisions of the previous administrations with which it no longer agreed, said the source, fearing that the law violates the law.
Since President Donald Trump has appointed Andrew Ferguson to replace Khan as president of the FTC in January, the republican regulator has committed to taking advantage of his authority to take care of large technological companies. Unlike Khan, however, Ferguson’s criticisms are concentrated around the Republican Party long -standing allegations according to which social media platformsLike Facebook and Instagram, censur conservative speech online. Before being selected as president, Ferguson told Trump that his agency vision also included the return of the Biden era regulations on artificial intelligence and stricter fusion standards, The New York Times reported in December.
In an interview with CNBC last weekFerguson argued that the moderation of the content could equip with an antitrust violation. “If companies degrade the quality of their product by launching people because they have special opinions, this could be an indication that there is a problem of competition,” he said.
Sources that express themselves with Wired said on Tuesday that technological companies are the only groups to benefit from the abolition of these blogs.
“They talk about a big game on censorship. But in the end, the thing that really strikes these results of these companies are the data they can collect, how they can use this data, that they can train their AI models on this data, and if this administration plans to remove the foot from the gas while accelerating its work on censorship, “according to the source. “I think it is a change whose technology would be very satisfied.”
