by Jeff Sovern A recent NY Times article, Chaos at Chain Pharmacies Is Putting Patients at Risk, reminded me of how the Wells Fargo quotas drove Wells employees to open unauthorized accounts. There's a lot in the article, but here are two excerpts: [CVS] Staff members were supposed to persuade 65 percent of patients picking […]
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Arbitration clauses, ubiquitous in financial and telecom services, are increasingly used by sellers of consumer products such as dishwashers and televisions. To get a sense of how often, Consumer Reports looked at the top-selling brands in the 10 product categories receiving the most traffic on its website, plus two types of products designed for safety: […]
Take a look at All-Caps by law profs Yonathan Arbel and Andrew Toler. Here is the abstract: A hallmark of consumer contracts is long blocks of capitalized text. Courts and legislators believe that such “all-caps” clauses improve the quality of consumer consent and thus they will often require the capitalization of certain key terms in […]
A column in the Washington Post today explains Facebook's new "Off-Facebook Activity" tool and suggests privacy settings you can change. Ever suspect the Facebook app is listening to you? What we now know is even creepier. Facebook is giving us a new way to glimpse just how much it knows about us: On Tuesday, the […]
Take a look at the Seventh Circuit's January 24 decision in Bigger v. Facebook, Inc., No. 19-1944. The Seventh Circuit succinctly sets out the dispute and its holding: This case presents the question whether a court may authorize notice to individuals [who are putative members of a Fair Labor Standards Act "collective" action and] who […]
The Montana Law Review is seeking papers on consumer law for a symposium to be held next September: The Montana Law Review invites submissions for the 2020 biennial Browning Symposium at the University of Montana’s Blewett School of Law. The symposium will take place September 24 and 25 in Missoula, Montana. The topic this biennium […]
The briefing is almost complete in Seila Law. v. Consumer Financial Protection Agency. In that case, the Supreme Court will consider whether the structure of the CFPB, which was established by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act of 2010, violates the separation of powers because the agency has a single direct who is removable by […]
Reuters reports on how protective orders sealing evidence about defective cars, drugs, and other products from public view can hide health and safety information from the public and impede government agencies — such as the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Food and Drug Administration — from protecting the public. The article is here.
The Hill reports: Roughly 58.5 billion robocalls were made in the U.S. last year, according to new research, marking a 22 percent increase from 2018. YouMail, a company that provides a service to block robocalls, estimated that the average American received 178.3 robocalls during the year. The full story is here.
A report released Tuesday by the Norwegian Consumer Council, a government-funded nonprofit organization in Oslo, describes how apps on our phones systematically violate users’ privacy collecting and sharing information with third-party advertisers without users’ knowledge or consent. The report "demonstrate[s] how every time we use our phones, a large number of shadowy entities that are […]