Quietly Killing a Consumer Watchdog. Excerpt: The consumer bureau has taken seriously its mandate to protect the public from the kinds of abuses that helped lead to the 2009 recession, and it has not been intimidated by the financial industry’s army of lobbyists. That’s what worries Republicans. They can’t prevent the bureau from regulating their […]
The symposium is scheduled for Feb. 28, 2013, 9:30 AM – 6:30 PM, at the UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON SCHOOL OF LAW (registration by Feb. 26). The announcement states: Mandatory disclosure is a popular form of regulation. From privacy to healthcare, politics to “payola,” laws requiring disclosure have proliferated in recent decades. This symposium features panel discussions by top scholars […]
We have posted here and here on the new FTC study showing that Americans' credit reports are often inaccurate in harmful ways. Now, read the study itself — all 370 pages of it. And take a look at this article on the study by Todd Ruger. There, Ira Rheingold, the head of the National Association of […]
One of my favorite Washington Post columnists, Alexandra Petri, whose pieces I find both topical and funny, has this insightful column today about a group whose perspective often gets lost in debates over the economy and initiatives to improve it. The takeaway: the "millennial" generation is in trouble, and has been for some time — […]
Earlier, we posted on the "60 Minutes" report concerning the error-prone, law-breaking credit reporting industry. U.S. PIRG's Ed Mierzwinki has this post on what needs to be done to reform the system.
by Brian Wolfman The CFPB cop appears to be on the beat. Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau published a bulletin advising mortgage companies about their legal obligations to protect consumers during loan transfers between mortgage servicers. CFPB is telling mortgage companies that, when handing off the processing of loans, mortgage servicers should not lose […]
A couple weeks ago, the editors of The Nation published this essay urging President Obama to use his executive authority to "push a progressive agenda." The essay discussed 20 policies on the environment, the economy, civil rights, workers' rights, and other topics both domestic and international that the authors believe that the President can, and […]
We have reported many times on the error-prone credit reporting industry and the industry's violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Go, for example, here, here, and here. Today, the Federal Trade Commission issues a eight-year study of the industry showing that up to 40 million Americans have a mistake on their credit report. Twenty […]
by Jeff Sovern Last Sunday, the Times published an article, Data Protection Laws, an Ocean Apart, which quoted the Commerce Department's general counsel, Cameron F. Kerry, as saying “The sum of the parts of U.S. privacy protection is equal to or greater than the single whole of Europe.” This is a remarkable assertion, given how […]
Derek E. Bambauer of Arizona has written Privacy Versus Security, forthcoming in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Here is the abstract: Legal scholarship tends to conflate privacy and security. However, security and privacy can, and should, be treated as distinct concerns. Privacy discourse involves difficult normative decisions about competing claims to legitimate access […]