Data Brokers

World Privacy Forum statement on federal privacy regulation & data brokers

The current debate over federal privacy regulation must be inclusive of secondary and tertiary uses of consumer data. WPF Executive Director Pam Dixon says: “Through our longstanding work regarding data brokers and related harms to consumers, it is abundantly clear that if Congress enacts privacy legislation that fails to effectively regulate data brokers and stop the consumer harms they directly cause, any legislation enacted will be a failure.”

Privacy News: Historic Data Broker Regulation in the US Welcomed by World Privacy Forum

PDF Version of Release here 24 May 2018  For Immediate Release Historic Data Broker Regulation in the United States Welcomed by World Privacy Forum Vermont: First state to adopt modern rules for unregulated data brokers WPF call for data broker protections to be elevated to national level and provided for consumers in all states in

Some Online Loan Applications Endanger Consumers

Have you ever filled out an application online for a “loan matching service”? If so, you have to hope that you didn’t fill out an application on one of the websites operated by a company called Blue Global. They ran websites like autoloansusa.com, loanmarketplace.com, moneytoday.com, 247loan.com, 100dayloans.com, and others. Court documents released this week by the US Federal Trade Commission reveal that after the company collected consumers’ financial information, it sold most of that information to non-lenders, including SSNs, bank account numbers, and …

When TVs watch you: What we learned from the FTC’s VIZIO case

Television maker VIZIO is paying $2.2 million in penalties to settle charges after the FTC and the New Jersey Attorney General’s office brought a complaint against the company for violating its customers’ privacy. The complaint against VIZIO stated that the company collected detailed information on millions of its customers TV viewing habits without their express consent, and that VIZIO facilitated something called “data appending,” which is when even more detailed information is added to existing customer profiles.