Last year, my co-author, Nahal Heydari, and I posted on SSRN a draft of our article, Not-So-Smartphone Disclosures, forthcoming in the Arkansas Law Review. We recently posted a new draft of the piece. The earlier draft reported, among other things, that consumers understood credit card disclosures less well on smartphones than on laptops and desktops […]
In a complaint filed by the department of Justice on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC says that California-based Experian Consumer Services, also known as ConsumerInfo.com, Inc., spammed consumers with marketing offers after they signed up for an account with the company in order to manage their Experian credit report information. In the […]
In June, George Mason professor Todd Zywicki testified before the Senate Commerce Committee’s Consumer Protection Subcommittee on junk fees. Professor Zywicki explained: I share the frustration that many consumers hold today regarding the proliferation of seemingly ubiquitous add-on fees that we experience constantly, from surcharges for using our credit cards at a merchant, to hotel […]
Tim Samples of the University of Georgia – Terry College of Business, Katherine Ireland of the University of Georgia Libraries, and Caroline Kraczon, a law fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, have written TL;DR: The Law and Linguistics of Social Platform Terms-of-Use, Berkeley Technology Law Journal (forthcoming 2023). Here’s an excerpt from the article about […]
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is taking applications for Honors Attorneys. Read about the job here. Applications will be accepted through September 11. Apply through USAJobs here.
Evan Weinberger has a report at Bloomberg Law (possibly behind paywall), as does Kate Berry at the American Banker (also behind paywall), and Reuters. Here’s an excerpt from the Bloomberg Law report: The coming proposal would seek to ban the sale of consumer data, including so-called “credit-header data” like a person’s name, address, or Social […]
Consumer law was a big campaign issue for a while in the wake of the Great Recession, and it may be again next year. AP’s Will Weissert has the story in an article headlined Biden and House Democrats hope to make curbing ‘junk fees’ a winning issue in 2024.
Yonathan A. Arbel of Alabama and Samuel Becher of the Victoria University of Wellington have written How Smart are Smart Readers? LLMs and the Future of the No-Reading Problem. Here’s the abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to summarize and simplify complex texts. In this study, we investigate the extent to which state-of-the-art models […]
Ballard Spahr’s Alan Kaplinsky interviewed Arthur E. Wilmarth, Professor Emeritus at GW, about crypto and its regulation at this week’s episode of the Consumer Finance Monitor podcast. I learned some things from the discussion that I plan to incorporate in my Payments Systems class next spring. Some of the discussion drew on Professor Wilmarth’s forthcoming […]
This week, inTrim v. Reward Zone USA LLC, the Ninth Circuit issued two separate opinions collectively affirming the dismissal of a claim brought under 47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(1)(A), based on the plaintiff’s receipt of unsolicited text messages. That statutory provision only applies to calls made using an “automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or […]