Blog Posts Tagged with Privacy and Security

Among the challenges that COVID-19 has brought, add a higher risk of identity theft to the mix. In the past year, we had about 1.4 million reports of identity theft, double the number from 2019. Repeatedly, identity thieves targeted government funds earmarked to help individuals and small businesses hard hit financially by the pandemic. Find out about identity theft in the age of COVID-19.

Flo Health pitched its Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker as a way for millions of women to “take full control of [their] health.” But according to the FTC, despite express privacy claims, the company took control of users’ sensitive fertility data and shared it with third parties – a broken promise that left consumers feeling “outraged,” “victimized,” and “violated.” Read on for details, including a notable feature in the proposed settlement.

To meet the needs of consumers who are injured or face a medical emergency while traveling, Scottsdale-based SkyMed International sells air evacuation plans and other services. The FTC’s action against SkyMed also involves consumer injury, but not of the fractured-femur-in-France variety. According to the FTC, SkyMed put consumers’ sensitive information at risk of compromise by failing to employ a robust data security program.

To quote studio head Samuel Goldwyn’s famous malaprop, an oral contract isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. The same can be said of a written security policy if a company doesn’t carry out its provisions.

Imagine turning on your computer one morning to discover you and your employees are locked out of your system. A threatening message appears on the screen demanding a ransom if you ever want to see your data again. You check your backups and they’ve been destroyed. Your business is at a standstill, losing money with every passing minute. It may sound like a nightmare, but for many companies, a ransomware attack is all too real. And even more disturbing is that reported ransomware attacks have increased dramatically since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cult classic The Big Lebowski proves that mistaken identity can be entertaining on film. But for people looking to rent a house or apartment, it wasn’t so entertaining when tenant background reports about them provided by California company AppFolio included someone else’s convictions and evictions.

This time last year, “zoom” was just a word related to speed. But the pandemic has made video conferencing platform Zoom a daily fixture for business people conferring about trade secrets, doctors and mental health professionals discussing sensitive patient information, kids keeping up with school work, and the rest of us sharing everything from the details of day-to-day life to confidential family matters.

Whether it’s a bogus message claiming your trademarks are about to expire unless you transfer money immediately or threats to ruin your credit if you don’t pay for unordered office supplies, scammers have small businesses in their sights. You can help the FTC and its partners fight fraud and you don’t even need to wear a superhero cape (unless you want to). Your story is your superpower. When you tell the FTC about frauds, scams, and other kinds of bad B2B practices, you’re helping the FTC and our law enforcement partners spot and stop scams.

It’s National Small Business Week, a time set aside annually to salute American’s 30 million small businesses – companies that employ almost half of the country’s private sector workforce. The special focus this year is on the resilience and resolve of entrepreneurs and workers as they battle back against the impact of the pandemic.