There are many real privacy problems in the United States today, from unfettered tracking of our activities online to the erosion of our rights against unwanted calls. Instead of focusing on how to improve our privacy protection, however, Congress is wasting time on a hearing about a threat to privacy that doesn’t exist – the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) collection and use of data.
To help inform its policy-making and improve its supervision of financial institution, the CFPB uses data from a variety of sources, including complaints that it receives from consumers, examinations of financial institutions’ records, publicly available data, and information from commercial data providers. Some of this data has no personally identifiable information about individuals, and where the agency does have such data, it has procedures in place to protect it. The intent is not to “snoop” into people’s lives, it’s to understand what is happening in the financial marketplace and the impact of financial products and practices on consumers and the economy in order to protect both better.
Today Consumer Federation of America and other groups that are genuinely concerned about privacy and security issued a statement reiterating what we said back in 2013 when questions about the CFBP’s use of data were raised – there is no smoke here, let alone a fire. The CFPB is using data responsibly and for the best of all possible purposes, to serve the public interest. If Congress is truly concerned about consumer privacy and security it should stop trying to preempt strong state protections and enact legislation that would rein in the data collection practices that commercial entities use to target vulnerable individuals for harmful products such as payday loans.
The CFPB was created because no one was paying attention to what was going on at financial institutions and we all paid the price for that. We want our financial watchdog to have the information it needs to ensure that we are being treated fairly. As our colleague Ed Mierzwinski at U.S. PIRG recently noted, the CFPB has already done so much for us in its first four years. Just let the CFPB do its job.