E-sports Operator Vulcun Says FTC Consent Order Filled With 'Blatant Factual Errors'

A co-founder of competitive videogaming company Vulcun -- which recently settled FTC allegations that it used a Google Chrome browser extension to launch ads without users' permissions (see 1602050036) -- said the commission's consent order contained "many inaccuracies and blatant factual errors." Posting the company's response on Medium.com Tuesday, Murtaza Hussain, who was named in the complaint with co-founder Ali Moiz, wrote that when Vulcun bought the browser extension and replaced it with its own, the company offered an "explicit" opt-in for users. "There was disclosure. Of the 200K users, about 15% or so Opt’ed in," he wrote. Rejecting an FTC allegation that users were barraged with ads, Hussain said the only ones shown were disclosed on the Chrome start page and they were the top apps of the day, which Vulcun didn't get paid for. He said the company promoted an ad one time when it garnered about 30,000 opt-in users. Many users liked it, but about 1 percent of users complained, mainly because "some of them had simply forgotten that they opt'ed in to this program and were surprised why/how this app got on their phone," he wrote. In response, Vulcun suspended the promotion and tried to improve the model, he wrote, but the company decided it couldn't eliminate the bad user experience and shut down the program in December 2014. The FTC opened the investigation in July 2015 as a result of the user complaints. "We decided to sign their order and move on. And then boom  --  many months after signing I see this press release that makes us look almost like con-artists," wrote Hussain. "As entrepreneurs we live and die by our reputations and I felt that I needed to set the record straight and tell my part of the story.”