An investigation by Senator Cantwell's oversight staff found that a "series of high-profile failures to effectively recall dangerous products has called into question the ability of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to adequately protect American consumers from unsafe and defective products. An extensive review by U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation […]
Author Archives: Allison Zieve
The Washington Post today reports on the expected effect of California's consumer privacy law, which was enacted in June 2018 and takes effect on January 1, 2020. The law aims to protect consumers from having their information sold without their knowledge or consent. The article — Calif consumer privacy law can affect businesses across U.S. […]
The New York Times has a lengthy piece today on location tracking through smartphones. Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times […]
An article in The Atlantic yesterday reported on apps that offer "advances" on salary. Although the companies that offer the apps insist that the advances are not "loans," the article explains that the companies look a lot like payday lenders. The "advances" come with many of the same problems as payday loans, problems that have […]
An article in Slate today addresses the Supreme Court's cases greatly restricting the availability of class actions as a recourse for the powerless against the powerful, largely through an atextual expansion of the Federal Arbitration Act. As the article notes, "[t]he swift decline of class actions over the last decade is regularly framed as an […]
NPR reports today on Secretary Betsy DeVos's decision to overrule the decision to forgive the federal student loans of students defrauded by now-defunct Corinthian Colleges and ITT. The story is here. Also today, the Department announced a new methodology for determining whether and if so how much relief to provide to student borrowers defrauded by […]
The Federal Trade Commission announced today that it has settled with the University of Phoenix and its parent company, Apollo Education Group, for a record $191 million to resolve FTC charges that the school used deceptive advertisements that falsely touted their relationships and job opportunities with companies such as AT&T, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Twitter, and The […]
By a vote of 417-3, the House of Representatives today passed a bill restricting robocalls. The TRACED Act would require phone companies to block robocalls without charging customers any extra money, require most carriers in the U.S. ensure that calls are coming from real numbers, and expand government authority to penalize robocallers. The Hill reports […]
The Department of Education stated in a court filing this week that it had pursued 29,000 more former Corinthian Colleges students for federal student loan payments than it had previously identified, despite a court order barring collection. As we noted in a post in October, a federal judge held Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in contempt […]
In mid December, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency will propose new regulations, substantially revising its rules under the Community Reinvestment Act. The 1977 Act is aimed at combating redlining, or racial bias in lending, requires banks to meet the needs of local communities where their branches are based, including low- and moderate-income […]