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 […]
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today ordered Wells Fargo Bank to pay more than $2 billion in redress to consumers and a $1.7 billion civil penalty for legal violations across several of its largest product lines. The bank’s illegal conduct led to billions of dollars in financial harm to its customers and, for thousands of […]
The New York Times reports: Until last month, a class-action lawsuit by Tesla owners looked as if it would reveal new details about the carmaker’s self-driving technology, which has been blamed for serious accidents and deaths. But then Tesla deployed a legal strategy that has allowed it to avoid the kind of attention-grabbing lawsuits other […]
A new ProPublica article reports that, “[f]rom a powerful chemical industry that helped write the toxic substances law to an underfunded EPA lacking in resolve, the flaws in the American chemical regulatory apparatus run deep.” When ProPublica published stories this fall cataloging new evidence that American chemical workers are being exposed to asbestos, readers reacted […]
by Jeff Sovern As I prepare to teach consumer law in the spring, I’m leaning towards adding a new case to the course, Bibbs v. TransUnion, LLC, 43 F.4th 331 (3rd Cir. 2022). First, take a look at what the court called a snapshot of the plaintiff’s credit report: Do you understand it (if […]
by Jeff Sovern New York Times reporter Emily Flitter's book The White Wall: How Big Finance Bankrupts Black America is an exploration of racism in American financial institutions, including banks, insurers, and brokerage houses. The book includes stories of how Black customers and employees are mistreated by these institutions, and places their treatment in a […]
The Washington Post reports that an outside group that was asked to examine problems at the Food and Drug Administration in the wake of an infant formula crisis this year offered a scathing indictment of the agency’s structure and culture and recommended major restructuring. The task force’s first suggestion was to create separate food and […]