The bottom line: "Presidents deserve wide latitude in choosing agency heads to carry out their mission in line with the administration's priorities. And USA TODAY has a long history of supporting those choices even when we disagree with the views of particular nominees. But the public should be able to demand, at a minimum, that […]
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Politico reports on continuing debate over rules to protect people from financial advisors' who put their own interests above those of the clients that they are advising. Older savers are often the targets of brokers’ self-enriching sales that saddle them with expensive products or investments they can’t easily exchange for cash, interviews with financial advisers […]
The Washington Post reports that "Facebook’s push to gain access to users' banking data and other sensitive financial information could help make online banking more efficient — or it could backfire among those skeptical that the world’s biggest social network can reliably safeguard personal data. The site has joined a growing race among big technology […]
by Paul Alan Levy An article in the Washington City Paper discusses a new feature on Yelp’s web site, which captures health department inspection records and boils them down to a score (in most jurisdictions, the scale runs from zero and 100). Some restaurateurs who are unhappy about having received low health scores sounded off […]
Law prof Eric Goldman has written An Introduction to the California Consumer Privacy Act. Here's the abstract: After a mere week of deliberations, the California legislature passed the Consumer Privacy Act (CPA), a sweeping, lengthy (10,000 words!), insanely complicated, and poorly drafted privacy regulation that will govern the world’s fifth largest economy. This short primer, excerpted […]
Jon Sheldon at the National Consumer Law Center discusses "Shortening the Limitations Period on Credit Card Collection Lawsuits": With the growth of the debt buying industry, the statute of limitations has become a particularly important defense in credit card collection lawsuits. Not only do debt buyers purchase credit card debt six months or more after […]
The Regulatory Review has a short piece on Betsy Devos's effort to roll back protections for student loan borrowers put in place under the Obama Administration, focusing on the borrower-defense rule. The post is here.
Mobile peer-to-peer payment services used on smartphones and tablets make it easy to transfer money between friends. Consumer Reports tested five mobile P2P services — Venmo, Square's Cash App, Facebook P2P Payments in Messenger, and Zelle — to see how they stacked up for protecting data-privacy and security. The article is here.
In a piece for the Washington Post wntitled In expensive cities, rents fall for the rich — but rise for the poor, Jeff Stein writes: U.S. cities struggling with soaring housing costs have found some success in lowering rents this year, but that relief has not reached the renters most at risk of losing their housing. […]
I thought our readers might be interested in this article by Peter Holley, which does a short survey of the state of the self-driving truck industry. While explaining that Uber is getting out of the self-driving business for now, the article suggests that we can expect seeing driverless trucks pretty soon. One company is planning to make […]