The Trump Administration’s Federal Trade Commission has removed four years of business counseling blogs from Tuesday morning, including important consumer protection information related to artificial intelligence and the rural privacy lawsuits of the agency under former chairman Lina Khan against companies such as Amazon and Microsoft. More than 300 blogs have been removed.
On the FTC’s website, the page that offers all the business-related blogs and guidance of the agency no longer contains any information published during former President Joe Biden’s administration, current and former FTC employees, who spoke under anonymity for fear of retaliation, says Wired. These blogs contain advice from the FTC on how large technical enterprises can avoid violating consumer protection laws.
One now deleted blog, entitled “Hey, Alexa! What are you doing with my data?” Explain how Amazon and the Ring Security Camera products, according to two FTC complaints, allegedly used sensitive consumer data to train the Algorithms of the E -Trade Giant. (Amazon does not agree with the demands of the FTC.) It also led businesses that operate similar products and services. Another post entitled “$ 20 million FTC settlement addresses Microsoft Xbox illegal collection of children’s data: a game changer for COPPA compliance” instructs technical enterprises on how to keep the Children’s online private protection law by using the 2023 Microsoft Settlement as an example. The settlement followed the allegations of the FTC that Microsoft obtained data from children using Xbox systems without the consent of their parents or guardians.
“In terms of the message to the industry about what our compliance expectations were, which in some ways is the most important part of the maintenance action, they are just trying to erase those from history,” a source tells Wired.
Another FTC blog entitled “The Luring Test: AI and the Engineering of Consumer Trust” contains an explanation of how businesses can avoid creating chatbots that violate the FTC Act’s rules against unfair or misleading products. This blog won an award in 2023 for ‘excellent descriptions of artificial intelligence’.
The Trump administration received broad support from the technology industry. Large technical companies such as Amazon and Meta, as well as technical entrepreneurs such as Openai CEO, Sam Altman, donated to Trump’s inauguration fund. Other Silicon Valley leaders, such as Elon Musk and David Sacks, officially advise the administration. Musk’s so -called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) has technologists in the service of Musk’s technical enterprises. And although federal agencies such as the general services administration AI products such as GSAI, a general government cap, have begun to roll out.
The FTC did not immediately respond to a request for comments from Wired.
The removal of blogs raises serious concerns about the Federal Records Act and the Open Government Data Act, one former FTC official told Wired. During the Biden Administration, FTC leadership ‘warning labels’ would place above the public decisions of the previous administrations with which it no longer agreed, the source said for fear that removal would violate the law.
Since President Donald Trump Andrew Ferguson has appointed Khan to replace Khan as chairman of the FTC in January, the Republican regulator has promised to use his authority to go to major technology companies. Unlike Khan, however, Ferguson’s criticism focuses on the prolonged allegations of the Republican Party that social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, conservative speech online censorship. Before he was elected chairman, Ferguson told Trump that his vision for the agency also included the regulations of the Biden era on artificial intelligence and more difficult merger standards, the New York Times reported in December.
In an interview with CNBC last week, Ferguson argued that moderation of content could be equal to an antitrust violation. “If businesses humiliate their quality of the product by kicking off people because they have special views, it may be an indication that there is a competition problem,” he said.
Sources that spoke to Wired on Tuesday claimed that technical companies are the only groups to benefit from the removal of these blogs.
“They talk a big game about censorship. But at the end of the day, the thing that really strikes these businesses is what data they can collect, how they can use the data, whether they can train their AI models on that data, and if this administration plans to get the foot there while holding his work on censorship, ‘the source said. “I think it’s a change that would be great technology very happy.”