Stakeholder #2

Another stakeholder in my controversy is Lumosity, the company being charged with false advertising and deceiving the consumers. Lumosity is a large company that does all of its interactions via the device the games will be played on. Lumosity is largely viewed, and therefore judged, by the content of their website, app, and games. Just like every other company, the content presented is very calculated. Lumosity has to put a lot of effort into deliberating how to present itself since there is no real face of the company that the consumers can associate with. The two tangible people faced with the charge, in addition to Lumosity/Lumos Labs as a whole, are Michael Scanlon and Kunal Sarkar. Michael was a PhD neuroscientist student at Stanford and has a A.B. in psychology from Princeton. Kunal has a B.A. in economics form Princeton. Both were Co-founders of Lumosity, the reason why they were blamed for the malpractice of advertising. Michael was the Chief Scientific Officer at Lumosity, taking responsibility for the exaggerated laboratory conclusions. Kunal was the chairman of the board of Lumos Labs, in charge of various business decisions, including what to emphasize in commercials and other forms of advertisements. The FTC decided that since these two men co-founded Lumosity together, and were responsible for the violations in both research and advertisement, they would have to face the 2 million dollar charge.

 "(Lumosity has made) strong contributions to the scientific community, including our work with the Human Cognition Project initiative..."

"Neither the action nor the settlement pertains to the rigor of our research or the quality of the products — it is a reflection of marketing language that has been discontinued..."

"Our focus as a company has not and will not change: We remain committed to moving the science of cognitive training forward and contributing meaningfully to the field's community and body of research."

All these quotations are directly in response to the charges, placed forth by the FTC. As expected, Lumosity defended their research. This does not have much weight or truth because Lumosity's main goal is to sell more product. Admitting any fault would hurt sales, and damage Luminosity's brand.

A large difference in the statements made by Lumosity and the other stakeholders is that Lumosity mainly focuses on their intentions rather than the actions that occurred. This is an easy way to stay out of trouble, since the company is not really elaborating on what actually happened. The researchers against Lumosity specifically call out invalid laboratory conclusions and the FTC focuses on the advertisements and claims made by Lumosity.