The Federal Trade Commission has reportedly launched an investigation into YouTube after complaints from consumer groups and privacy advocates alleging that YouTube violates kids' privacy. The complaints contend that YouTube failed to protect kids who used the streaming-video service and improperly collected their data in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a 1998 […]
Professors Brian Feinstein, Chen Meng, and Manisha Padi took a look at that question from one angle in State Attorneys General & Lender Behavior. Here is the abstract: The Dodd-Frank Act empowers state attorneys general to enforce, with limited exception, both state and federal laws concerning predatory lending, unfair and deceptive practices, information disclosure, and […]
That's the title of this ProPublica piece by Anjali Tsui and Alice Wilder. Among other things, this article explains that the payday loan industry's trade group has held its last two annual conventions at a Trump property while at the same time that the Trump Administration's regulatory stance has been decidedly pro-payday lending. The article […]
The Dallas Morning News reports that Think Finance Inc., a Fort Worth financial firm, will cancel its outstanding loans and pay nearly $40 million to consumers after engaging in an alleged payday lending operation that used Native American tribes as shields from state laws. Think Finance serviced loans that charged interest rates over 375% and […]
In yesterday's opinion in Virginia Uranium, Inc. v. Warren, the Supreme Court held that a Virginia law banning uranium mining is not preempted by the Atomic Energy Act. The vote was 6 to 3, with the six Justices in the majority divided between two separate opinions—the first announcing the judgment of the Court, written by […]
by Jeff Sovern Regular blog subscribers may recall that last year, at Richard Alderman's Teaching Consumer Law Conference, I asked two questions of attendees about whether they read contracts or required disclosures (those results are available here). James Nehf generously allowed me to ask the same questions at his IACL conference last week. The IACL […]
In The Continuum of Aggregation, law prof Alexi Lahav discusses the commonalities in various types of aggregated litigation. Here is the abstract: This essay, written for a conference marking the fiftieth anniversary of the multidistrict litigation statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1407, traces the evolution in thinking about aggregation, analyzes the forms of aggregate litigation — […]
by Jeff Sovern I've spent the last few days at a terrific International Association of Consumer Law conference at the of Indiana University's Robert H. McKinney Law School (my second great conference in five months, the other being Ted Mermin's Berkeley Consumer Law Scholars Conference). Indiana's James Nehf clearly had worked very hard to put […]
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit yesterday rejected Facebook's effort to avoid a Telephone Consumer Protection Act lawsuit on First Amendment grounds. Facebook had argued that a recent amendment to the law, which excepted calls seeking to collect debts owed to or guaranteed by the federal government from the TCPA's ban on […]
by Jeff Sovern Link here Excerpt: [T]the bureau proposal would invade consumer privacy by allowing collectors to bombard consumers with demands for payment. Under the proposal, debt collectors could try the consumer’s phone number seven times a week and leave voicemails each time. That may not sound too bad, but the CFPB reports that nearly […]