"New guidelines issued by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for banks they oversee stop short of completely disallowing deposit advances. But the guidelines should reduce the banks’ profits while making the loans less onerous to borrowers." The Times urges the Fed to follow suit in regulating […]
Author Archives: Scott Michelman
As the Times' Dealbook section reports: Nearly seven years since the Military Lending Act came into effect, government authorities say the law has gaps that threaten to leave hundreds of thousands of service members across the country vulnerable to potentially predatory loans — from credit pitched by retailers to pay for electronics or furniture, to […]
Five years ago, John Palmer ordered Christmas gifts online from a web merchant called KlearGear.com. When the gifts didn’t come and John’s attempts to contact KlearGear were unsuccessful, his wife Jen posted a negative review on RipoffReport.com. In 2012, the Palmers received a demand from KlearGear for $3500. According to KlearGear, the Palmers violated a […]
Implementing the settlement over its "Sponsoned Stories" program — to which Public Citizen objected in May and has now appealed this fall — Facebook has changed its privacy program to make more clear to users when it will use their images in advertising. As the Times put it, "If you post something on Facebook, let […]
Today Public Citizen filed the opening brief in an appeal on behalf of a putative class of Applebee's workers throughout New York State. The workers sued their employer, T.L. Cannon, owner and operator of 53 Applebee's locations in New York, claiming various wage violations, including that the employer trained its supervisors and managers to manipulate […]
An NPR economic reporter sent an online request for a $500 payday loan to see what happened. So what happened? A barrage of contacts, by phone and email, seeking to lend her all kinds of amounts, as high as ten times the amount she asked for, and at interest rates as high as 1300%. But […]
As this article from late last week explains, a new study of the effects of the 2009 Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act finds that the Act is saving consumers more than $20 billion dollars a year by placing limits on certain credit card company practices that could lead to surprise fees for […]
This story from NPR's Morning Edition this morning discusses various states' efforts to handle consumer questions regarding the implementation of Obamacare. Several states are outsourcing the operation of call centers to companies like Maximus, but most of the states won't make public how much they are paying for the service; for instance, Connecticut's contract with […]
Check out this story at MediaPost describing lobbying efforts by the Digital Marketing Association "to overhaul privacy laws in order to protect companies' ability to use data for marketing purposes."
We've blogged before about the "Company Doe" case, in which a company sued to block the inclusion of a product report in the Consumer Product Safety Commission's publicly available, web-accessible database about potentially dangerous products. The district court permitted the company to litigate in secret and under the pseudonym "Company Doe," and a coalition of […]