David C. Vladeck (born June 6, 1951)[1] is an American lawyer and the former director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection of the Federal Trade Commission, an independent agency of the United States government.
[7][8][9] Vladeck’s brother, Bruce, headed the Health Care Financing Administration, now called the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, under President Bill Clinton.
[10] While a student at New York University, Vladeck played on the school’s basketball team[1] Before joining the faculty of the Georgetown University Law Center, Vladeck spent nearly 30 years as a lawyer at the Public Citizen Litigation Group, the litigation arm of Public Citizen, an advocacy organization founded by Ralph Nader.
He taught courses in federal courts, civil procedure, and government processes and co-directed the Institute for Public Representation, a legal clinic.
[18] He has advocated a new framework that is broader than just economic interests, and that doesn’t rely solely on privacy policies to protect consumers online.
The software contained a privacy policy with detailed disclosures about the type of information to be collected and how it would be used, and consumers suffered no economic harm when they downloaded it.
Vladeck stated that "under the harm framework, we couldn’t have brought that case," but that because "there’s a huge dignity interest wrapped up in having somebody looking at your financial records when they have no business doing that," the commission was justified in suing.
As Mother Jones magazine noted during the Bush Administration, the FTC "brought an average of one subprime lending case a year (in 2004 and 2005 there weren't any), even as the industry was experiencing record growth and complaints mounted about abusive practices leading to home foreclosures.
Once the testimonials, reviews and/or results are verified, the company can include them in their profiles and add a 'trust mark' similar to that of Verisign, the Better Business Bureau, or Good Housekeeping.
The presence of this seal or trust mark helps consumers determine how much weight they should give to the testimonials they are reading before making a decision to support a business.