Co-Authored by Prof. Woodrow Hartzog
On Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit issued its long-awaited decision in LabMD’s challenge to an FTC enforcement action: LabMD, Inc. v. Federal Trade Commission (11th Cir. June 6, 2018). While there is some concern that the opinion will undermine the FTC’s power to enforce Section 5 for privacy and security issues, the opinion actually is quite narrow and is far from crippling.
While the LabMD opinion likely does have important implications for how the FTC will go about enforcing reasonable data security requirements, we think the opinion still allows the FTC to continue to build upon a coherent body of privacy and security complaints in an incremental way similar to how the common law develops. See Solove and Hartzog, The FTC and the New Common Law of Privacy, 114 Columbia Law Review 584 (2014).
The article addresses the scope of FTC authority in the areas of privacy and data security (which together we refer to as “data protection”). We argue that the FTC not only has the authority to regulate data protection to the extent it has been doing, but that its granted jurisdiction can expand its reach much more. Normatively, we argue that the FTC’s current scope of data protection authority is essential to the United States data protection regime and should be fully embraced to respond to the privacy harms unaddressed by existing remedies available in tort or contract, or by various statutes. In contrast to the legal theories underlying these other claims of action, the FTC can regulate with a much different and more flexible understanding of harm than one focused on monetary or physical injury.
