How can you protect your privacy online?

How can you protect your privacy online? A New York Times article today suggests that you can't.

People concerned about privacy often try to be “careful” online. They stay off social media, or if they’re on it, they post cautiously. They don’t share information about their religious beliefs, personal life, health status or political views. By doing so, they think they are protecting their privacy.

But they are wrong. Because of technological advances and the sheer amount of data now available about billions of other people, discretion no longer suffices to protect your privacy. Computer algorithms and network analyses can now infer, with a sufficiently high degree of accuracy, a wide range of things about you that you may have never disclosed, including your moods, your political beliefs, your sexual orientation and your health.

There is no longer such a thing as individually “opting out” of our privacy-compromised world.

The full article is here.

Odinet article on student debt, fintech, and discrimination

Christopher K. Odinet of Oklahoma has written The New Data of Student Debt, 92 Southern California Law Review (Forthcoming). Here is the abstract:

Silicon Valley is increasingly setting its sights on student lending. Financial technology (fintech) firms such as SoFi, CommonBond, and Upstart are ever-expanding their online lending activities to help students finance or refinance educational expenses. These online companies are using a wide array of alternative, education-based data points — ranging from applicants’ chosen majors, assessment scores, the college or university they attend, job history, and cohort default rates — to determine creditworthiness. Fintech firms argue that through their low overhead and innovative approaches to lending they are able to widen access to credit for underserved Americans. Indeed, there is much to recommend when it comes to using different kinds of information about young consumers in order assess their financial ability. Student borrowers are notoriously disadvantaged by the extant scoring system that heavily favors having a prior credit history. Yet, there are also downsides to the use of education-based data by private lenders. This Article critiques the use of this kind of borrower information, arguing that while it can have a positive effect in promoting social mobility, it could also have significant downsides. Chief among these are reifying existing credit barriers along income and class lines and further contributing to discriminatory lending practices that harm women, black and Latino Americans, and minority groups. The discrimination issue is particularly difficult because of the novel and opaque underwriting algorithms that facilitate these online loans. This Article concludes by proposing three-pillared regulatory guidelines for fintech credit firms to use in designing, implementing, and monitoring their education-based data underwriting systems.

Prince & Schwarcz article on how AI is a game-changer for proxy discrimination

Anya Prince of Iowa and Daniel Schwarcz of Minnesota have written Proxy Discrimination in the Age of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data, Iowa Law Review, Forthcoming. Here's the abstract:

Big data and Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) are revolutionizing the ways in which firms, governments, and employers classify individuals. Surprisingly, however, one of the most important threats to antidiscrimination regimes posed by this revolution is largely unexplored or misunderstood in the extant literature. This is the risk that modern algorithms will result in “proxy discrimination.” Proxy discrimination is a particularly pernicious subset of disparate impact. Like all forms of disparate impact, it involves a facially-neutral practice that disproportionately harms members of a protected class. But a practice producing a disparate impact only amounts to proxy discrimination when the usefulness to the discriminator of the facially-neutral practice derives, at least in part, from the very fact that it produces a disparate impact. Historically, this occurred when a firm intentionally sought to discriminate against members of a protected class by relying on a proxy for class membership, such as zip code. However, proxy discrimination need not be intentional when membership in a protected class is predictive of a discriminator’s facially-neutral goal, making discrimination “rational.” In these cases, firms may unwittingly proxy discriminate, knowing only that a facially-neutral practice produces desirable outcomes. This Article argues that AI and big data are game changers when it comes to this risk of unintentional, but “rational,” proxy discrimination. AIs armed with big data are inherently structured to engage in proxy discrimination whenever they are deprived of information about membership in a legally-suspect class that is genuinely predictive of a legitimate objective. Simply denying AIs access to the most intuitive proxies for predictive but suspect characteristics does little to thwart this process; instead it simply causes AIs to locate less intuitive proxies. For these reasons, as AIs become even smarter and big data becomes even bigger, proxy discrimination will represent an increasingly fundamental challenge to anti-discrimination regimes that seek to limit “rational discrimination.” This Article offers a menu of potential strategies for combatting this risk of proxy discrimination by AI, including prohibiting the use of non-approved types of discrimination, mandating the collection and disclosure of data about impacted individuals’ membership in legally protected classes, and requiring firms to employ statistical models that isolate only the predictive power of non-suspect variables.

Anticipating the CFPB's Debt Collection Rules

Reporter Renae Merle has a story up at the Washington Post about the debt collection rules that the CFPB is expected to unveil “in a few weeks.” The story was prompted, in part, by a recent speech given by CFPB Director Kathy Kraninger during which she “laid out a business-friendly vision for the CFPB.” The article highlights what will certainly be contentious issues addressed by the new rules, like how, and how often, debt collectors are allowed to contact consumers.

The full story is available here.

Sandy Hook, gun-maker liability, and state consumer-protection law

Take a good look at this easy-to-read, informative essay by law prof Heidi Li Feldman in the Harvard Law Review blog. In Why the Latest Ruling in the Sandy Hook Shooting Litigation Matters, Feldman explains that, among other things, the Connecticut Supreme Court's recent decision in Soto v. Bushmaster Firearms (concerning the prospect of liability for gun manufacturers, distributors, and direct sellers in the Sandy Hook massacre) is potentially important as a matter of state UDAP law.

NYT on the CFPB: "Mick Mulvaney’s Master Class in Destroying the Government From Within"

The New York Times has a lengthy article on Mick Mulvaney's tenure as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

This account of Mulvaney’s tenure is based on interviews with more than 60 current or former bureau employees, current and former Mulvaney aides, consumer advocates and financial-industry executives and lobbyists, as well as hundreds of pages of internal bureau documents obtained by The New York Times and others. When Mulvaney took over, the fledgling C.F.P.B. was perhaps Washington’s most feared financial regulator: It announced dozens of cases annually against abusive debt collectors, sloppy credit agencies and predatory lenders, and it was poised to force sweeping changes on the $30 billion payday-loan industry, one of the few corners of the financial world that operates free of federal regulation. What he left behind is an agency whose very mission is now a matter of bitter dispute. “The bureau was constructed really deliberately to protect ordinary people,” says Lisa Donner, the head of Americans for Financial Reform. “He’s taken it apart — dismantled it, piece by piece, brick by brick.”

Although Mulvaney has move don to serve as White House Chief of Staff, he had a notable on the work of the CFPB.

Over the last year, Mulvaney’s temporary hiring freeze has turned into an indefinite one, slowly shrinking the C.F.P.B.’s staff by attrition. Bureau news releases, once packed with colorful details about abusive lending practices, have been toned down to dry legalese. According to a report by Christopher Peterson, a senior fellow at the Consumer Federation of America, enforcement at the bureau appears to have dwindled radically. In 2018, the bureau announced just 11 lawsuits or settlements, less than a third of the number during Cordray’s last year. In the months since Mulvaney reorganized the Office of Fair Lending, the bureau has not brought a single case alleging illegal discrimination. While Mulvaney pledged data-driven enforcement, his bureau brought only one case against debt collectors, who account for more complaints to the C.F.P.B. than almost any other industry. Where Mulvaney or his successor have allowed cases to go forward, lenders have often settled with lowered fines or none at all. When the bureau settled a three-year prosecution of a group of payday lenders called NDG Enterprise — which found that the group had falsely threatened American customers with arrest and imprisonment if they failed to repay loans — NDG walked away without paying a cent.

The full article is here.

Online lending company settles FTC charges of deceptive and unfair servicing practices

Avant, LLC, an online lending company, has agreed to settle the Federal Trade Commission’s charges that it engaged in deceptive and unfair loan servicing practices, including imposing unauthorized charges on consumers’ accounts and unlawfully requiring consumers to consent to automatic payments from their bank accounts.

According to the FTC’s complaint, Avant offers unsecured installment loans for consumers through its website. The FTC charged that in many cases, the company falsely advertised that it would accept payments by credit or debit cards, when in fact it rejected these forms of payments. The FTC also alleged that the company withdrew money from consumers’ accounts or charged their credit cards without authorization. In some instances, Avant charged consumers duplicate payments without authorization, improperly taking consumers’ monthly payments twice or more in one month. For example, one consumer’s monthly payment was debited from his account 11 times in a single day. In many cases when consumers complained about the unauthorized charges, Avant allegedly insisted that the consumers authorized the charges and refused to provide a refund. 

The stipulated final order imposes a judgment of $3.85 million, which will be returned to consumers who were harmed by Avant’s unlawful practices.

Under the settlement order, Avant will be prohibited from taking unauthorized payments and from collecting payment by means of remotely created check. The company also is prohibited from misrepresenting: the methods of payment accepted for monthly payments, partial payments, payoffs, or any other purpose; the amount of payment that will be sufficient to pay off in its entirety the balance of an account; when payments will be applied or credited; or any material fact regarding payments, fees, or charges.

Bruckner et al. article on when the DOE should not contest the discharge of student loans

Matthew A. Bruckner of Howard, Brook Gotberg of Missouri, Dalié Jiménez of Irvine and Harvard's Center on the Legal Profession, and Chrystin D. Ondersma of Rutgers have written No-Contest Discharge for Uncollectable Student Loans, forthcoming in the University of Colorado Law Review (2020). Here is the abstract:

Over 44 million Americans owe more than 1.4 trillion dollars in student loan debt. This debt is uniquely difficult to shed in bankruptcy; even attempting to do so usually requires costly and contentious litigation with the Department of Education, and initial success may be followed by years of appeals by the Department of Education. As a result, very few student loan borrowers even attempt to discharge their student loan debt in bankruptcy.

In this Article, we call on the Department of Education to develop a set of nine easily calculable and verifiable circumstances in which it will not contest a debtor’s attempt to discharge her student loan debt. Nearly every category of “no-contest” discharge represents a circumstance where the debtor would clearly suffer an undue hardship if forced to continue to attempt repayment, such that the Department of Education should conserve taxpayer dollars by consenting to discharge. Specifically, we urge the Department of Education to allow a “no-contest” discharge when the debtor’s income is less than 150% of the federal poverty level and:
(1) household income has been at or below the federal poverty level for the last four years;
(2) the debtor receives disability benefits under the Social Security Act;
(3) the debtor receives disability benefits because of military service;
(4) the debtor’s income is derived solely from retirement benefits;
(5) the debtor is a caregiver of an adult or child as defined in the Lifetime Respite Care Act;
(6) the debtor is a family caregiver of an eligible veteran;
(7) the debtor did not receive a degree from the institution or the institution closed;
(8) the debtor owes less than $5,000; or
(9) the debtor has been repaying their student loans for more than 25 years. 

Our proposal will not solve every problem, but it would go a long way towards resolving many of the grosser inequities currently associated with student loans and their treatment in bankruptcy. 

 

Senators introduce consumer online privacy bill

Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Deb Fischer (R-NE) have introduced a bill to prohibit large online platforms from using deceptive user interfaces, known as “dark patterns,” to trick consumers into handing over their personal data.

Dark patterns refers to online interfaces in websites and apps designed to intentionally manipulate users into taking actions they would otherwise not take under normal circumstances. These design tactics, drawn from extensive behavioral psychology research, are frequently used by social media platforms to mislead consumers into agreeing to settings and practices advantageous to the company.

The bill is here. The Senators' press release is here (or here).

FTC acts against Genuix "cognitive improvement" supplements

Twelve corporate and four individual defendants have settled Federal Trade Commission charges that they deceptively marketed “cognitive improvement” supplements using sham news websites containing false and unsubstantiated efficacy claims, references to non-existent clinical studies, and fraudulent consumer and celebrity endorsements.

The FTC also alleged that the defendants used affiliate marketers to make deceptive claims about their products, which they sold using different names, including Geniux, Xcel, EVO, and Ion-Z. The settlements ban the defendants from engaging in this conduct.

The FTC's press statement, with links to the complaint and settlements, is here.

Kraninger agrees with Mulvaney that she doesn't have to answer Congress's questions

by Jeff Sovern

This transcript of the young Kathleen Kraninger has recently been unearthed:

Adult: Did you eat the chocolate chip cookies?

Kraninger: I will stipulate that there were chocolate chip cookies and that they are no longer here.

Adult: Did you eat them?

Kraninger: I understand what you're getting at.

Adult: Did you take the cookies?

Kraninger: That's a loaded word.

Adult: For the last time, did you eat the cookies?

Kraninger: That's being looked into and I think it would be inappropriate for me to prejudge it.

Adult: I have only five minutes, so I have to move on. Did you drink the chocolate milk?

This parody was inspired by CFPB Director Kraninger's testimony before the House Financial Services and the Senate Banking Committee on the CFPB's semi-annual report to Congress, and if you have listened to that testimony as I now have, the parody will sound depressingly familiar.  You may remember how Acting CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney took the ridiculous position that he didn't have to answer Congress's questions during his appearances (though he often did answer the questions). Director Kraninger seems to agree she doesn't have to answer some questions, but instead of saying so, she deflects them.  I don't know much about Congress's power to hold people in contempt, but I wonder if this would be an appropriate place to use that power. We hear a lot of charges that the CFPB is unaccountable.  Well, that would be another way to hold the Director accountable. 

I can understand one reason why Director Kraninger might not want to answer the questions directly: she wants to give the justification for her decision, but once the questioners get the answer they want--often a yes or no--they cut her off, so she jumps straight to defending herself so she can get that into the record. But the committees include many members who are sympathetic to her, and they could give her an opportunity to explain her decisions, if they wanted to. Perhaps those members have their own agendas or don't want to devote their scant time to defending decisions that may be unpopular or difficult to defend. In any event, Director Kraninger would do better to answer the questions she is asked. 

 

 

"Issue" class actions in mass-tort multi-district litigation

Myriam Gilles and Gary Friedman have written Rediscovering the Issue Class in Mass Tort MDLs. Here's the abstract:

For the past twenty-plus years, MDL transferee judges have essentially regarded the class device as unavailable as they struggle to organize masses of tort actions sent their way by the JPML. Even the badges and incidents of class practice, in the form of common-fund-based approaches to attorney compensation and lead-counsel structures for case organization, have come under attack from commentators who insist that mass-tort MDLs should not be treated as “quasi-class actions,” and that Rule 23 does not present a “grab bag” from which MDL judges may pick and choose the most convenient implements. Leading lights of the complex litigation academy are emphatic that procedures for selecting and compensating class action counsel are uniquely rooted in the language, history and structure of Rule 23: when pirated away from their doctrinal home, we are told, these collective practices become contraband. 

The thesis of this essay is that judges and commentators are wrong to categorically reject class-based procedures in mass tort MDLs, as they do. Contrary to popular belief, Rule 23 does provide, if not a grab bag (that’s too opaque), a Black & Decker toolbox chock-a-block with shiny and promising instruments. Most centrally, we contend that Rule 23(c)(4), when properly employed, provides a doctrinally sound and constitutional means for achieving scale efficiencies in mass tort cases. Indeed, the issue class device is unique, among potential approaches to mass-harm litigation, in its ability to confer – meaningfully and durably – preclusive effects to core issues and shave years off of otherwise “black hole” MDL litigations – all while remaining fully consistent with Supreme Court case law, the Seventh Amendment, the text of Rule 23 and other relevant sources of positive law.

 

U.S. PIRG report on bank-sponsored campus debit cards

Read this new report by U.S. PIRG about how banks market debit cards on college campuses -- cards that come with significant fees. The gist is that banks pay colleges big bucks via "paid marketing agreements" that give the banks the right to market student card accounts that will receive certain funds, such as student loans. The banks then in turn profit handsomely from the fees imposed on students' use of the cards. The report found that "[s]tudents at schools with a paid marketing agreement with a financial account provider [bank] paid 2.3 times as much in fees as students at schools without a paid marketing agreement." Go here to learn more about the PIRG study.

And over at the Washington Post, Daniel Douglas-Gabriel has written this story on the PIRG report, which notes "that College students paid nearly $25 million in fees on campus-sponsored debit cards last year as banks struck lucrative deals with universities to offer financial products to largely low-income populations."

Imre Szalai Study Finds 78 Fortune 100 Companies Use Class Action Waivers in Consumer Agreements

Imre S. Szalai of Loyola of New Orleans has written The Prevalence of Consumer Arbitration Agreements by America’s Top Companies, 52 U.C. Davis L. Rev. Online 233 (2019). Here is the abstract: 

This article present the results of a study that examines the use of arbitration agreements by the top 100 Fortune Magazine-ranked largest domestic companies in the United States. The market power of these companies, which collectively represent more that two-thirds of the U.S. GDP, have enabled them to impose arbitration agreements upon their customers and have removed themselves from the traditional judicial system when disputes arise with their customers.

This study focuses on two main issues: 1) How many of these top companies have used arbitration agreements in connection with customer transactions since 2010; and 2) Of those companies, how many use arbitration agreements containing a “class waiver” requiring customers to waive their right to proceed collectively or as part of a class. The study then concludes with some observations about the prevalence of consumer arbitration agreements among America’s top companies.

Reidenberg et al. Article on Trustworthy Privacy Indicators

Joel R. Reidenberg of Fordham, together with four co-authors, has written Trustworthy Privacy Indicators: Grades, Labels, Certifications and Dashboards, 96 Washington University Law Review  (2019).  Here's the abstract:

Despite numerous groups’ efforts to score, grade, label, and rate the privacy of websites, apps, and network-connected devices, these attempts at privacy indicators have, thus far, not been widely adopted. Privacy policies, however, remain long, complex, and impractical for consumers. Communicating in some short-hand form, synthesized privacy content is now crucial to empower internet users and provide them more meaningful notice, as well as nudge consumers and data processors toward more meaningful privacy. Indeed, on the basis of these needs, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Federal Trade Commission in the United States, as well as lawmakers and policymakers in the European Union, have advocated for the development of privacy indicator systems.

Efforts to develop privacy grades, scores, labels, icons, certifications, seals, and dashboards have wrestled with various deficiencies and obstacles for the wide-scale deployment as meaningful and trustworthy privacy indicators. This paper seeks to identify and explain these deficiencies and obstacles that have hampered past and current attempts. With these lessons, the article then offers criteria that will need to be established in law and policy for trustworthy indicators to be successfully deployed and adopted through technological tools. The lack of standardization prevents user-recognizability and dependability in the online marketplace, diminishes the ability to create automated tools for privacy, and reduces incentives for consumers and industry to invest in a privacy indicators. Flawed methods in selection and weighting of privacy evaluation criteria and issues interpreting language that is often ambiguous and vague jeopardize success and reliability when baked into an indicator of privacy protectiveness or invasiveness. Likewise, indicators fall short when those organizations rating or certifying the privacy practices are not objective, trustworthy, and sustainable.

Nonetheless, trustworthy privacy rating systems that are meaningful, accurate, and adoptable can be developed to assure effective and enduring empowerment of consumers. This paper proposes a framework using examples from prior and current attempts to create privacy indicator systems in order to provide a valuable resource for present-day, real world policymaking.

First, privacy rating systems need an objective and quantifiable basis that is fair and accountable to the public. Unlike previous efforts through industry self-regulation, if lawmakers and regulators establish standardized evaluation criteria for privacy practices and provide standards for how these criteria should be weighted in scoring techniques, the rating system will have public accountability with an objective, quantifiable basis. If automated rating mechanisms convey to users accepted descriptions of data practices or generate scores from privacy statements based on recognized criteria and weightings rather than from deductive conclusions, then this reduces interpretive issues with any privacy technology tool. Second, rating indicators should align with legal principles of contract interpretation and the existing legal defaults for the interpretation of silence in privacy policy language. Third, a standardized system of icons, along with guidelines as to where these should be located, will reduce the education and learning curve now necessary to understand and benefit from many different, inconsistent privacy indicator labeling systems. And lastly, privacy rating evaluators must be impartial, honest, autonomous, and financially and operationally durable in order to be successful.

 

Still Another Update to the List of Schools Teaching Consumer Law

Here are Sara's revised statistics, and the listings appear after the jump:

110 classes total (53.92%)

32 clinics total (15.69%)

89 only offer a class (43.63%)

11 only offer a clinic (5.39%)

21 offer both (10.29%)

121 offer either (59.31%)

Gilles & Friedman paper on Qui Tam as a model for enforcement of group rights

Myriam E. Gilles of Cardozo and Gary B. Friedman of the Friedman Law Group have written The New Qui Tam: A Model for the Enforcement of Group Rights in a Hostile Era. Here is the abstract:

The present Administration has made clear it has no interest in enforcing statutes designed to protect workers, consumers, voters and others. And, as we have chronicled in prior work, the ability of private litigants to enforce these laws has been undercut by developments in the case law concerning class actions – particularly class-banning arbitration clauses. As these critical enforcement methods recede, will alternative methods of prosecuting claims arise? How might they work? Are they politically and fiscally sustainable? We focus here on a promising approach just now coming into view: qui tam legislation authorizing private citizens to bring representative claims on behalf of consumers, workers, and others. Progressive advocates have recently begun working with legislators in a handful of states to provide a qui tam mechanism for enforcing state statutory rights. The form these new laws might take remains uncertain and their enforceability is sure to be hotly contested by corporate interests and others. This article examines the legal and policy challenges that will face “new qui tam” legislation, and considers arguments for and against enlarging the role of citizens in prosecuting claims – an inquiry that requires us to determine the legitimacy and limits of the private attorney general model in its starkest form.

More on the Consumer Product Safety Commission

The Washington Post reports today that the CPSC was pursuing a recall of the BOB stroller, which apparently has a defect that has caused hundreds of crashes. Then the Trump appointees to the Commission halted the effort.

Staff members at the Consumer Product Safety Commission collected 200 consumer-submitted reports from 2012 to 2018 of spontaneous failure of the stroller wheel, which is secured to a front fork by a quick-release lever, like on a bicycle. Nearly 100 adults and children were injured, according to the commission. The agency’s staff members investigated for months before deciding in 2017 that one of the most popular jogging strollers on the market was unsafe and needed to be recalled.

When the company refused to voluntarily recall the product, the agency sued to force a recall. But in 2018, Republicans became a majority on the Commission for the first time in a decade. The CPSC's effort to recall the stroller soon changed:

According to a review of documents by The Washington Post and interviews with eight current and former senior agency officials, the agency’s Republican chairwoman kept Democratic commissioners in the dark about the stroller investigation and then helped end the case in court.

The company agreed to a settlement that did not include a recall or formal correction plan.

The full article is here.

Are Elite Law Schools Elite When It Comes to Consumer Law Classes?

by Jeff Sovern

For a variety of reasons, what elite law schools do has an effect on legal education disproportionate to the numbers of such schools.  For one reason, most law professors attended an elite law school, and their vision of what a law school should be is informed by their experiences as students.  Consequently, if elite law schools offer a consumer law course, future law professors are more likely to see such a course as appropriate for their law school to offer; if the school they went to didn't offer such a course, law professors have an easier time seeing the subject as one a school can do without. So how do the elite law schools do at offering consumer law classes?  According to our survey, only eight of the schools ranked in the top fourteen offer some form of a consumer law course or clinic (Harvard, Chicago, Penn, Virginia, Michigan, Duke, Berkeley, and Georgetown). The top schools not doing so include Yale, Stanford, Columbia, NYU, Cornell, and Northwestern.  Put another way, 57% of elite law schools have a consumer law offering of one kind or another, which is close to the percentage for non-elite schools. So when it comes to consumer law, the elite schools as a whole are just ordinary.

Those numbers havn't shifted much over time.  Michigan didn't offer a course in 2014 and now does.  And only two schools, Virginia and Northwestern, didn't offer the course in 2007 and now do. 

Proposal regarding litigation finance

Law prof Maya Steinitz has written Follow the Money? A Proposed Approach for Disclosure of Litigation Finance Agreements. Here is the abstract:

Litigation finance is the new and fast-growing practice by which a non-party funds a plaintiff’s litigation either for-profit or for some other motivation. Some estimates placed the size of the litigation finance market at 50–100 billion dollars. Both proponents and opponents of this newly -emergent phenomenon are in agreement that the it is the most important development in civil justice of this era. Litigation finance is already transforming civil litigation at the level of the single case as well as, incrementally, at the level of the civil justice system as a whole. It is also beginning to transform the way law firms are doing business and it will increasingly shape the careers of civil litigators at firms small and large. Consequently, Congress, state legislatures, state and federal courts, bar associations, international arbitration institutions, as well as legislatures and courts in other nations are all proceeding along dozens of parallel tracks grappling with how to regulate litigation finance and especially with the question of what, if any, disclosure requirements to impose on such financing. 

This Essay aims to turn the debate inside out by proposing to abandon the quest for a bright line rule and to instead adopt a flexible, discretionary standard; a balancing test. The Essay then culminates in a specific proposal for the contours – the interests and factors – which judges and arbitrators should be empowered and required to weigh when deciding whether and what form of disclosure to require. More specifically, the Essay details and rationalizes the specific interests – public and private – and factors to consider including the profile of the plaintiffs and their motive for seeking funding; the funder’s profile and motivation; the case type and the forum; the subject matter of the litigation; the potential effect on the development of the law; the structure of the financing; the purpose of the contemplated disclosure; and the procedural posture of the case.

Read about Office Depot's scam to fix infected computers that were not infected and needed no fixing

Read Michele Singletary's column about the scam here. The allegations against Office Depot were not pretty, and, as SIngletary explains, the Federal Trade Commission has put an end to the fraudulent scheme. Here's the gist of it:

Although not admitting any wrongdoing, Office Depot and California-based Support.com have agreed to pay $35 million to settle the claim that they deceived customers into believing their computers were infected with malicious malware and vulnerable to other security threats. The FTC alleged that, from at least 2009 to late 2016, the companies would offer customers a free “PC Health Check Program” to determine whether their computers had any performance problems. But the real purpose of the checkup was to aggressively sell diagnostic and repair services to customers that, in many cases, they didn't need, according to Claire Wack, an attorney in the FTC's division of marketing practices and the lead attorney on the case.

Read the FTC's press release, which contains links to key documents in the case.

Questions about industry influence at CPSC

Two weeks ago, we blogged, here, about FairWarning's investigation, here, into industry influence at the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Now, the House Energy and Commerce committee has called on the acting head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Ann Marie Buerkle, to disclose her contacts with business groups, and has noted concern that the FairWarning article “suggests you are prioritizing the interests of industry over the safety of consumers.”

The March 29 letter from Committee Chair Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) and Consumer Protection Subcommittee Chair Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) requests copies of all communications with industry or voluntary standards groups regarding the establishment of federal product safety rules. The letter also requests information on whether Buerkle has directed CPSC employees to delay work on safety standards or other corrective actions “in a manner inconsistent with the recommendation of career staff.”

FairWarning's follow-up article is here.

CFPB issues its annual report about consumer complaints

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has issued its 2018 Consumer Response Annual Report, which, as its name (sorta) suggests, reports on consumer complaints to the agency. The CFPB received about 330,000 complaints in 2018. The report discusses consumer complaints and the CFPB's response to them in 13 categories:

credit or consumer reporting, debt collection, mortgages, credit cards, checking or savings accounts, student loans, money transfers, money services, and virtual currencies, vehicle loans or lease, personal loans, prepaid cards, payday loans, credit repair, and title loans

New Federal Housing Administration mortgage underwriting standard

This article by Kenneth Harney explains the new standards:

First-time and move-up home buyers with heavy debt loads, low credit scores and small down payments face a daunting new mortgage hurdle: The Federal Housing Administration is toughening its underwriting standards. Large numbers of applications could be turned down in the coming months as a result. Industry estimates vary about the impact of the agency’s abrupt changes, but mortgage company executives told me last week that they are bracing for reductions in their FHA business by anywhere from 10 percent to 30 percent.

 

More Revisions to the List of Law Schools Teaching Consumer Law

by Jeff Sovern

Sara has updated the list once more in light of comments.  It appears below the fold. We are still accepting comments, so if you have not yet registered yours, please send it in.  As for the statistics, they are as follows:

109 classes total (58.33%)

32 clinics total (15.69%)

88 offer only a class (43.14%)

11 offer only a clinic (5.39%)

21 offer both (10.29%)

120 offer one or the other or both (58.82%)