by Jeff Sovern Last week, we linked to Ed Mierzwinski's post about complaints about CFPB information-gathering processes. There's more. Over at the Taking Charge blog, Fred Williams has a post on the CFPB data collection, Privacy Agencies Say Don't Worry: Consumer Bureau is No Spy. Here's an excerpt: "I am not aware of any privacy […]
Category Archives: Privacy
Ed's excellent post is here. Those who purport to be so concerned about the privacy of bank customers should seek to amend the Gramm-Leach-Bliley privacy provisions to bar banks from selling consumer information unless their customers affirmatively opt-in to the sale of that information. But that would mean supporting consumer protection, precisely what the CFPB […]
Paul M. Schwartz of Berkeley and Daniel J. Solove of George Washington have written Reconciling Personal Information in the United States and European Union. Herer's the abstract: US and EU privacy law diverge greatly. At the foundational level, they diverge in their underlying philosophy: In the US, privacy law focuses on redressing consumer harm and […]
by Jeff Sovern Last week, the Times ran an article about companies that sell consumer data to businesses but won't provide it to the consumers involved. Despite the headline, reprinted above, I thought the article didn't really explain why companies won't provide the information to consumers. So I wrote a letter with my explanation, which […]
by Jeff Sovern When mobile phones have GPS devices, as many smart phones do, mobile phone providers can track their customers wherever they take their phones (providers can also track phones lacking a GPS, but less precisely). For an example, go here to see how Deutsche Telefon recorded the location of one of its customers for […]
The prolific Chris Jay Hoofnagle of Berkeley and Jan Whittington of the Department of Urban Design and Planning, University of Washington have written The Price of 'Free': Accounting for the Cost of the Internet's Most Popular Price, forthcoming in 61 UCLA Law Review (2014). Here's the abstract: Offers of “free” services abound on the internet. […]
Here. (HT: Michael Romero)
Here. And it's less than three minutes.
Here. And here's the beginning: Imagine you’ve clicked on your computer screen to accept a contract to purchase a good or service—a contract, you only realize later, that’s straight out of Kafka. The widget you’ve bought turns out to be a nightmare. You take to Yelp.com to complain about your experience—but lo, according to the […]