"How new regulations saved consumers billions in credit card fees"

Vox has this article by writer Harold Pollack on the CARD Act, the credit-card industry, and the value of paying off credit cards every month.

CFPB annual report to Congress

On Monday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released its annual report to Congress on the work of the agency from October 1, 2014 - September 30, 2015. If you missed it then (as I did), the report is here.

"Takata Emails Show Brash Exchanges About Data Tampering"

...is the headline of this week's NYT story about internal emails at the manufacturer whose airbags have been the subject of a recall after federal regulators recognized that they had the potential to explode and shoot debris at passengers. A taste of the article:

“Happy Manipulating!!!” a Takata airbag engineer, Bob Schubert, wrote in one email dated July 6, 2006, in a reference to results of airbag tests. In another, he wrote of changing the colors or lines in a graphic “to divert attention” from the test results and “to try to dress it up.”

For a refresher on the scandal, see our prior discussions here, here, and here.

For this week's story on the tampering emails, go here.

Ninth Circuit upholds Facebook settlement

It's been a while since we discussed the Facebook minors'-privacy case, a class action over Facebook's use of members' images in ads without their consent. Public Citizen represented parents who objected to the proposed settlement because it permitted Facebook to continue using their children's images in ads without parental consent -- a practice that violates the law in seven states (CA, FL, NY, OK, TN, VA, WI). After the district court approved the settlement, the parents appealed.

Today the Ninth Circuit affirmed in a cursory decision. The court didn't engage with our arguments that the settlement was unlawful; it said only that the district court did not abuse its discretion by approving the settlement because "[i]t is . . . not clear whether the settlement at issue . . . violates state law." This conclusory statement is surprising in light of the plain text of the state laws at issue. For instance, in California, “Any person who knowingly uses another’s name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness, in any manner, on or in products, merchandise, or goods, or for purposes of advertising or selling, or soliciting purchases of, products, merchandise, goods or services, without such person’s prior consent, or, in the case of a minor, the prior consent of his parent or legal guardian, shall be liable . . . .” Cal. Civ. Code § 3344(a) (emphasis added). The laws of Florida, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin are to similar effect, and there are additional criminal prohibitions on this practice in New York, Oklahoma, and Tennessee. What more did the court need? Its decision, disappointingly, did not say.

$15 minimum wage for NYC workers

From the Times:

Mayor Bill de Blasio is set to announce on Wednesday a $15-an-hour minimum wage for New York City’s public work force that city officials said would be among the highest of its kind in the country.

Under the mayor’s plan, which matches a similar increase for state employees enacted by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo last year, about 50,000 city workers — including crossing guards, prekindergarten teachers, custodial workers and others — would see their pay reach the $15-an-hour level by the end of 2018.

Read more here.

Busy day at the FTC

The Federal Trade Commission had a busy yesterday, settling charges in three separate matters, as described in these FTC press releases:

• FTC Secures $4.4 Million From Online Payday Lenders to Settle Deception Charges

• Dental Practice Software Provider Settles FTC Charges It Misled Customers About Encryption of Patient Data

• Lumosity to Pay $2 Million to Settle FTC Deceptive Advertising Charges for Its “Brain Training” Program

 

Justice Department sues Volkswagen over emissions scheme

The NYT reports:

The Justice Department sued the German automaker Volkswagen in federal court on Monday, saying that the company installed illegal devices in nearly 600,000 diesel engine systems to impair emissions controls, increasing harmful air pollution. But despite a pledge by the Justice Department in September to go after executives responsible for corporate wrongdoing, federal prosecutors stopped short of criminal charges and did not single out individuals. . . . 

In September, Volkswagen admitted that it had installed the software created to cheat on emissions tests in 11 million of its diesel vehicles worldwide, setting off one of the largest corporate scandals in the auto industry. Since then, regulators in the United States and Canada have accused the company of also installing devices to cheat emissions on some vehicles with larger engines, a claim Volkswagen has disputed. Federal prosecutors on Monday said the company had “impeded and obstructed” regulators’ inquiries and provided “misleading information.”

Read the full story here. (For some of our previous discussions of the scandal, see here and here.)

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.