Here. Excerpt: [C]alls are quietly deposited through a back door, directly into a voice mail box — to the surprise and (presumably) irritation of the recipient, who cannot do anything to block them. Regulators are considering whether to ban these messages. They have been hearing from ringless voice mail providers and pro-business groups, which argue […]
Category Archives: Privacy
Here. This is for offline credit card purchases. Surveillance capitalism indeed. Excerpt: Google’s new ability to match people’s offline credit card purchases to their online lives is a stunning display of surveillance capitalism in action. The capability, which Google unveiled this week, allows the company to connect the dots between the ads that it […]
Consumer protection litigator Joel Winston wrote the article that prompted the fact check, and here is the fact check.
Florencia Marotta-Wurgler of NYU has written Self-Regulation and Competition in Privacy Policies, 45 Journal of Legal Studies (2016). Here's the abstract I investigate alternative explanations for the content of privacy policies. Under one model of self-regulation, firms signal their privacy protections to consumers by highlighting compliance with third-party guidelines. However, in a sample of 249 […]
Here. Excerpt: They can figure out when you leave town and see where you parked your car. They can see how many times you went to the grocery store or the health clinic. Auto loans to Americans with poor credit have been booming, and many finance companies, credit unions and auto dealers are using technologies […]
by Jeff Sovern The FTC, New Jersey AG's Office, and Vizio have agreed to a court order under which Vizio will pay 2.2 million to settle charges that Vizio recorded and sold information about the viewing practices of consumers watching Vizio TVs without obtaining consumers' consent and without their knowledge. You can read Leslie Fair's […]
Here. Pai, a Republican, has been critical of FCC interpretations of the TCPA (see here and here). Here's the perspective of ACA International, an industry organization : Of particular importance to the credit and collection industry, Pai has fiercely objected to the FCC’s more recent interpretations of the TCPA spearheaded by Wheeler. Authoring a hard-hitting […]
Omri Ben-Shahar and Lior Strahilevitz, both of Chicago, have written an introduction to a symposium, Contracting Over Privacy: Introduction, 43 Journal of Legal Studies, No. S2, 2016. Here's the abstract: This short essay introduces papers presented at the symposium Contracting over Privacy, which took place at the Coase-Sandor Institute for Law and Economics at the University of […]
James C. Cooper and Joshua D. Wright, both of George Mason have written The Missing Role of Economics in FTC Privacy Policy, Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Privacy, Jules Polonetsky, Evan Selinger & Omer Tene, eds., Cambridge University Press (2017), Forthcoming. Here's the abstract: The FTC has been in the privacy game for almost twenty years. In […]
by Jeff Sovern The Ninth Circuit reversed the portion of the Facebook, Inc. v. Power Ventures, Inc., case at page 510 of our consumer law casebook, dealing with the CAN-SPAM Act, on the issue of whether the spam was materially misleading. Other portions of the decision, not reprinted in the casebook, were affirmed in part. The decision is reported […]