US Consumer Bureau Opens Online Credit Card Complaint DB 162
chiguy writes "The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau begins releasing detailed information on Americans' complaints about their credit cards online. From The Washington Post: 'The CFPB said it will only publish complaints after it has verified the consumer's relationship with the company. The new database will include not only the name of the company involved, but also the nature of the complaint and the consumer's Zip code. It will also report whether the firm responded in a timely manner, how the matter was resolved and any disputes. The CFPB said it has received more than 45,000 in the year since the bureau was launched.' Complaints about mortgages, student loans, and checking accounts will be added later. Financial institutions are complaining loudly, decrying the enforcement of one of the main tenets of the free market: transparency."
Epic fail (Score:5, Interesting)
Financial institutions are complaining loudly, decrying ...
The real complaint is they paid billions to elect these guys, and look what happens. My suspicion is within days / weeks this will be defanged. Perhaps you'll only be able to look up complaints if you're already a customer of that bank, or it'll be made illegal to refer to these complaints in any way in advertising, or perhaps the names of the companies will be censored from public view, etc. I bet a simple hack to prevent citizens from using it would be the "only publish complaints after it has verified the consumer's relationship with the company" clause, whoops we have no budget this year for any verifications, what a surprise, I guess we can't publish anything this year... or ever. Another simple hack would be to prevent lookups solely by company name, must specify company name AND zip code AND mom's maiden name or something like that.
The new database will include not only the name of the company involved, but also the ...
consumers account number, PIN number, CVW number, SS number, and mothers maiden name. Wanna bet that it'll be, at most, a select query on the same server as the sensitive personal stuff is stored? And they'll be people uploading complaints named "Bobby tables" within hours of opening. This may be part of the scheme above... complain and everyone on the net can hear about it, but all of your personal data will be on a torrent site within hours, so you better not complain in public after all, serf.
consumer ... consumer ...
I hate being called a consumer. The article is about modern day debt-serfs anyway, not consumers. I want to be a citizen, you know, with like rights and stuff. Just like you know anyone using the N-word probably isn't worth listening to, anyone using the C-word probably isn't worth listening to. (Cloud is another good C-word to ignore)