Reports on Senator Dodd's Mortgage Bill and Ask.Com's Privacy Protections

Here is the report in today's Times on Senate Banking Committee Chair Dodd's mortgage bill.  The story compares the Dodd bill to the House bill.  An excerpt:

Like the House measure . . . Mr. Dodd’s bill requires lenders to make only those loans that benefit borrowers and that they can repay. But Mr. Dodd’s proposal would also require brokers to act in the interest of borrowers, and that Wall Street firms could be sued.

Investment banks that securitize mortgages could also be sued under Mr. Frank’s measure, but state authorities would be prohibited from pursuing certain claims against Wall Street.

In an interview last week, [Congressman Barney] Frank [who authored the House bill] said he planned to toughen his bill’s enforcement provisions as it relates to investment banks, but he added that the demand for home loans would dry up if investors in mortgage securities were subject to lawsuits brought by state officials.

Unlike the Frank bill, Mr. Dodd’s proposal would bar specific practices in subprime lending like prepayment penalties, which borrowers have to pay if they try to refinance or pay off their loans early within a few years, and yield spread premiums, which are commissions lenders pay to brokers for gettingpersuading borrowers to take out a higher-cost loan than they could qualify for. But Mr. Dodd’s bill would not create a national registry of brokers and loan officers as the House measure would.

The Times also reports here on Ask.com's program to discard information gathered from consumer searches.  Consumers wishing to keep Ask.com from retaining their information wil have to use "AskEraser," which is to be conspicuously displayed on Ask.com's main search page.  Ask.com contrasts with other search engines, like Google, which retain consumer information for 18 months or so.  This promises to be an interesting privacy experiment.  Ask.com is betting that enough consumers care about their privacy to switch to their service from competitors; it will be interesting to see whether Ask.com's market share, currently under 5%, increases.  It's not clear to me, though, how much privacy protection consumers will get.  Ask.com will still provide query information to Google (!) which supplies many of Ask.com's ads.