Consumer Law & Policy Blog

UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONSUMER LAW CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS

Quoting from the announcement:

The Department of Mercantile Law at the University of Pretoria, South Africa will host an international consumer law conference that will focus on relevant developments internationally and nationally in the field of consumer law. The conference theme is "Towards Aligning Consumer Protection in a Global Consumer Market". The following aspects of consumer law will be covered:

• The consumer in the financial market

• The over-indebted consumer

• The consumer and defective goods

• The consumer and e-commerce

• The vulnerable consumer

• The consumer and unfair marketing and commercial practices

• The consumer and disclosure

• The consumer and contract terms

• Access to redress for consumers

• Ensuring a fair and competitive market for consumers

 

 Kindly submit your abstract of no more than 450 words to

Jani van Wyk at janie.vanwyk@up.ac.za

For further detailed information regarding the conference, please visit our conference website at:

http://web.up.ac.za/default.asp?ipkCategoryID=22724

 

Web Privacy Census Updated

Ibrahim Altaweel of Good Research, Nathan Good, also of Good Research, and Chris Jay Hoofnagle of Berkeley have posted their updated Web Privacy Census, Technology Science 2015121502, Online. Here is the abstract:

Most people may believe that online activities are tracked more pervasively now than they were in the past. In 2011, we started surveying the online mechanisms used to track people online (e.g., HTTP cookies, Flash cookies and HTML5 storage). We called this our Web Privacy Census. We repeated the study in 2012. In this paper, we update the study to 2015.

Results summary: Our approach uses web crawler software to simulate online browsing behavior, and we record the occurrences of tracking mechanisms for the top 100, 1,000, and 25,000 most popular websites. We found that users who merely visit the homepages of the top 100 most popular sites would collect over 6,000 HTTP cookies in the process (see Top 100 Websites -- Shallow Crawl). Eighty-three percent of cookies are third-party cookies. The homepages of popular sites placed cookies for 275 third-party hosts. In just visiting the homepage of popular sites, we found 32 websites placed 100 or more cookies, 7 websites placed 200 or more cookies, and 6 websites placed 300 or more cookies. We found that Google tracking infrastructure is on 92 of the top 100 most popular websites and on 923 of the top 1,000 websites. This means that Google's ability to track users on popular websites is unparalleled, and it approaches the level of surveillance that only an Internet Service Provider can achieve.

-- We repeated a 2012 survey of tracking mechanisms such as HTTP cookies, Flash cookies, and HTML5 storage, used by top 25,000 most popular websites.

-- We found that users who merely visit the homepages of the top 100 most popular sites would collect over 6,000 HTTP cookies with 83% being third-party cookies.

-- We found that Google tracking infrastructure is on 92 of the top 100 most popular websites and on 923 of the top 1,000 websites, providing Google with a significant surveillance infrastructure online.

"The flawed system that allows companies to make millions off the injured"

...is a Post feature from last week about the practice of structured-settlement purchasing.

The story summarizes:

Unlike traditional settlements, which are paid out in one sum, structured settlements dispense the payout in portions over a lifetime to protect vulnerable people from immediately spending it all. Since 1975, insurance firms have committed an estimated $350 billion to these agreements, spawning a secondary market in which companies compete to buy payments for a smaller amount of upfront cash.

Such deals, industry advocates say, get desperate people the money they need for emergencies and big expenses, such as home purchases. But they also expose sellers to the risk that they will exchange lifetimes’ worth of income for pittances.

Read the piece here.

Jeffrey Davis Paper Compares US and Australian Credit-Granting Law

Jeffrey Davis of Florida has written Regulating for the First Time the Decision to Grant Consumer Credit: A Look at the First Steps Taken by the United States and Australia.  Here is the abstract:

In this Article, I discuss the changes in three consumer-credit realms. First, I compare the Australian regime applicable to all forms of consumer credit granting, including mortgage lending, to the American regulation of the consumer mortgage-granting decision. Second, I compare the Australian and American approaches to the decision to authorize use of, or increase the credit limit on, individual credit cards. Third, I compare the two approaches to regulating small short-term loans, usually called payday loans. Finally, I compare the enforcement regimes of both countries — perhaps the key to it all.

And here is a paragraph from the Introduction describing some of the differences in the two countries' treatment of consumer credit:

The Australian approach to regulating the decision to grant consumer credit differs systematically from that in the United States. First, Australia requires responsible credit granting in all forms of consumer credit, whereas the United States thus far constrains the decision only in the narrow realms of home mortgage lending, credit cards, and military payday loans. Second, the American concept of responsible consumer lending requires only an assessment of the debtor’s ability to pay, whereas the Australian concept requires a determination of whether the credit is "suitable," requiring not only an assessment of the consumer’s likely ability to pay, but also an inquiry into the consumer’s requirements and objectives in borrowing. Third, Australia requires anyone engaging in consumer credit activity to obtain a credit license. While most American states require licenses to engage in certain types of consumer credit, such as becoming a mortgage broker, there is no such general requirement in any state, and the federal government makes no such requirement at all. Fourth, Australia alone provides a process that is unique in the world for External Dispute Resolution that is cost-free to the consumer.

 

More Terms and Conditions Humor

From Pearls Before Swine.  (HT: ContractsProf Blog)