The Department of Education announced today a proposal to “to reduce the cost of federal student loan payments, especially for low and middle-income borrowers.” The Department says that the proposed regulations “would create the most affordable income-driven repayment (IDR) plan that has ever been made available to student loan borrowers, simplify the program, and eliminate […]
The Washington Post reports that companies touting new tech products — including health wearables, smart TVs, autonomous vehicles, and other gadgets that rely on data from our bodies or homes — seldom directly address how they treat customer’s data after it’s collected or their approach to safety and security. The article is here.
Read this December 15, 2022 article in Consumer Reports, titled “Lead and Cadmium Could Be in Your Dark Chocolate,” which found, based on product testing, “dangerous heavy metals in chocolate from Hershey’s, Theo, Trader Joe’s and other popular brands.” (The article also found that other products are safer.) Two class actions have been filed against Trader Joe’s […]
In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Eric Wemple explains: A 2015 investigative series [by the New York Times] documented how such clauses have become increasingly common in many kinds of contracts, leaving consumers at the mercy of an arbitration regime often predisposed against their interests. Subsequent coverage, on both the news and editorial […]
Daniel Collier, Assistant Professor of Adult and Higher Education, University of Memphis and Dan Fitzpatrick, Research and Assessment Specialist, University of Michigan, have written Jubilee and Jubilation: An Examination of the Relationship between Public Service Loan Forgiveness and Measures of Well-Being. Here is the abstract: A team of researchers at the University of Memphis and the […]
On Wednesday, the Office of Management and Budget issued the Fall 2022 Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions. The Unified Agenda lists the regulations that each of the federal agencies are currently planning to work on. Among many other topics, the rules in progress include a Federal Trade Commission rule on children’s online privacy […]
We received the following announcement: Automating Bias Symposium Cardozo Law School January 25, 9:30- 4:45 Algorithmic models built using machine learning and large volumes of personal data are increasingly used to target consumers with credit offers, assess consumers’ creditworthiness, price credit, provide debt management advice to consumers, resolve credit disputes, and more generally automate the […]
The Federal Trade Commission made a few interesting announcements in late December: FTC Orders an End to Illegal Mastercard Business Tactics and Requires it to Stop Blocking Competing Debit Card Payment Networks (Dec. 23) – Mastercard will have to start providing competing networks with customer account information they need to process debit payments, reversing a […]
In late December, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released a report covering the financial health of American households. Here is the report summary: In 2022, consumer financial health continued to be buoyed by pandemic relief, high employment, and increased savings accumulated during the first year of the pandemic. But financial health was no longer as […]
Each month, NPR broadcasts a story, “Bill of the Month,” about a medical billing issue. In this month’s, a hospital confused two patients who have the same first and last names (their middle initials are different, but that didn’t prevent the mistake) and sent a bill to the wrong one. Eventually, a debt collector dunned […]