GOP senator targets FTC over privacy

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Monday slammed the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) response to privacy scandals at Google and Facebook as “toothless” in a letter to the agency’s chairman.

Hawley, a freshman, has made his mark as one of the Republican Party’s most vocal tech critics since he started in Congress. His letter to FTC Chairman Joseph Simons comes one day before the Judiciary Committee holds a hearing on data privacy.

“Any robust definition of consumer welfare must acknowledge that [Google and Facebook] have harmed consumers by conditioning participation … on giving away enormous — and growing — amounts of personal information,” Hawley wrote. “Yet the approach the FTC has taken to these issues has been toothless.”

Lawmakers and consumer advocates have increasingly placed a spotlight on the FTC in recent years, slamming the agency’s failure to rein in the tech giants’ data-collection practices. The agency is tasked with probing whether tech companies adhere to their own privacy policies, but FTC regulators are unable to fine companies for first-time offenses.

Even Simons, the Republican FTC chairman, in a New York Times interview last week criticized the FTC’s authority as overly narrow, saying legislators who outlined its powers 100 years ago “were not thinking about data security and privacy issues.”