#cfpb

[liberalsarecool]

Corrupt soulless scumbags like Musk and Trump will sell out America in a heartbeat.

Musk and Trump need corruption for them to exist.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ad-tech targeting is an existential threat

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me TORONTO on SUNDAY (Feb 23) at Another Story Books, and in NYC on WEDNESDAY (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN. More tour dates here.

The commercial surveillance industry is almost totally unregulated. Data brokers, ad-tech, and everyone in between – they harvest, store, analyze, sell and rent every intimate, sensitive, potentially compromising fact about your life.

Late last year, I testified at a Consumer Finance Protection Bureau hearing about a proposed new rule to kill off data brokers, who are the lynchpin of the industry:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

The other witnesses were fascinating – and chilling, There was a lawyer from the AARP who explained how data-brokers would let you target ads to categories like "seniors with dementia." Then there was someone from the Pentagon, discussing how anyone could do an ad-buy targeting "people enlisted in the armed forces who have gambling problems." Sure, I thought, and you don't even need these explicit categories: if you served an ad to "people 25-40 with Ivy League/Big Ten law or political science degrees within 5 miles of Congress," you could serve an ad with a malicious payload to every Congressional staffer.

Now, that's just the data brokers. The real action is in ad-tech, a sector dominated by two giant companies, Meta and Google. These companies claim that they are better than the unregulated data-broker cowboys at the bottom of the food-chain. They say they're responsible wielders of unregulated monopoly surveillance power. Reader, they are not.

Meta has been repeatedly caught offering ad-targeting like "depressed teenagers" (great for your next incel recruiting drive):

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/01/105987/is-facebook-targeting-ads-at-sad-teens/

And Google? They just keep on getting caught with both hands in the creepy commercial surveillance cookie-jar. Today, Wired's Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra report on a way to use Google to target people with chronic illnesses, people in financial distress, and national security "decision makers":

https://www.wired.com/story/google-dv360-banned-audience-segments-national-security/

Google doesn't offer these categories itself, they just allow data-brokers to assemble them and offer them for sale via Google. Just as it's possible to generate a target of "Congressional staffers" by using location and education data, it's possible to target people with chronic illnesses based on things like whether they regularly travel to clinics that treat HIV, asthma, chronic pain, etc.

Google claims that this violates their policies, and that they have best-of-breed technical measures to prevent this from happening, but when Wired asked how this data-broker was able to sell these audiences – including people in menopause, or with "chronic pain, fibromyalgia, psoriasis, arthritis, high cholesterol, and hypertension" – Google did not reply.

The data broker in the report also sold access to people based on which medications they took (including Ambien), people who abuse opioids or are recovering from opioid addiction, people with endocrine disorders, and "contractors with access to restricted US defense-related technologies."

It's easy to see how these categories could enable blackmail, spear-phishing, scams, malvertising, and many other crimes that threaten individuals, groups, and the nation as a whole. The US Office of Naval Intelligence has already published details of how "anonymous" people targeted by ads can be identified:

https://www.odni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ODNI-Declassified-Report-on-CAI-January2022.pdf

The most amazing part is how the 33,000 targeting segments came to public light: an activist just pretended to be an ad buyer, and the data-broker sent him the whole package, no questions asked. Johnny Ryan is a brilliant Irish privacy activist with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties. He created a fake data analytics website for a company that wasn't registered anywhere, then sent out a sales query to a brokerage (the brokerage isn't identified in the piece, to prevent bad actors from using it to attack targeted categories of people).

Foreign states, including China – a favorite boogeyman of the US national security establishment – can buy Google's data and target users based on Google ad-tech stack. In the past, Chinese spies have used malvertising – serving targeted ads loaded with malware – to attack their adversaries. Chinese firms spend billions every year to target ads to Americans:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/business/google-meta-temu-shein.html

Google and Meta have no meaningful checks to prevent anyone from establishing a shell company that buys and targets ads with their services, and the data-brokers that feed into those services are even less well-protected against fraud and other malicious act.

All of this is only possible because Congress has failed to act on privacy since 1988. That's the year that Congress passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you have at home. That's also the last time Congress passed a federal consumer privacy law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

The legislative history of the VPPA is telling: it was passed after a newspaper published the leaked video-rental history of a far-right judge named Robert Bork, whom Reagan hoped to elevate to the Supreme Court. Bork failed his Senate confirmation hearings, but not because of his video rentals (he actually had pretty good taste in movies). Rather, it was because he was a Nixonite criminal and virulent loudmouth racist whose record was strewn with the most disgusting nonsense imaginable).

But the leak of Bork's video-rental history gave Congress the cold grue. His video rental history wasn't embarrassing, but it sure seemed like Congress had some stuff in its video-rental records that they didn't want voters finding out about. They beat all land-speed records in making it a crime to tell anyone what kind of movies they (and we) were watching.

And that was it. For 37 years, Congress has completely failed to pass another consumer privacy law. Which is how we got here – to this moment where you can target ads to suicidal teens, gambling addicted soldiers in Minuteman silos, grannies with Alzheimer's, and every Congressional staffer on the Hill.

Some people think the problem with mass surveillance is a kind of machine-driven, automated mind-control ray. They believe the self-aggrandizing claims of tech bros to have finally perfected the elusive mind-control ray, using big data and machine learning.

But you don't need to accept these outlandish claims – which come from Big Tech's sales literature, wherein they boast to potential advertisers that surveillance ads are devastatingly effective – to understand how and why this is harmful. If you're struggling with opioid addiction and I target an ad to you for a fake cure or rehab center, I haven't brainwashed you – I've just tricked you. We don't have to believe in mind-control to believe that targeted lies can cause unlimited harms.

And those harms are indeed grave. Stein's Law predicts that "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Congress's failure on privacy has put us all at risk – including Congress. It's only a matter of time until the commercial surveillance industry is responsible for a massive leak, targeted phishing campaign, or a ghastly national security incident involving Congress. Perhaps then we will get action.

In the meantime, the coalition of people whose problems can be blamed on the failure to update privacy law continues to grow. That coalition includes protesters whose identities were served up to cops, teenagers who were tracked to out-of-state abortion clinics, people of color who were discriminated against in hiring and lending, and anyone who's been harassed with deepfake porn:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/20/privacy-first-second-third/#malvertising

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[porterdavis]

To be fair, he did buy the Presidency

[bitchesgetriches]

🌟NEW POST!🌟

I don’t want to keep doing this, you guys! Do you think I like Cassandraing all over the public library and Medicaid and the CFPB and the fucking FDIC????

Nevertheless, here I am once again lighting the beacons for a governmental institution so gd boring I had to trick you all into reading this with a salacious headline. The beacons are lit! Gondor calls for aid!

FDIC Insured Banking Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means: The Truth About Securing Your Savings

Video Version 🍋 Audio Version 🍋 Text Version

[destiel-news-network]

(Source)

The CFPB, which investigates & regulates banks screwing folks over, was established by an act of Congress and cannot legally be decommissioned by executive order.

[saywhat-politics]

Judge orders CFPB to reinstate fired employees, preserve records and get back to work

Judge Amy Berman Jackson sided with the CFPB employee union that sued acting CFPB director Russell Vought last month.

A federal judge on Friday ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s leadership, appointed by President Donald Trump, to halt its campaign to hobble the agency.

Berman ordered Vought to reinstate all probationary and term employees fired after Vought took over at the CFPB, said that he shouldn’t “delete, destroy, remove, or impair agency data,” and struck down Vought’s February stop-work order.

“To ensure that employees can perform their statutorily mandated functions, the defendants must provide them with either fully-equipped office space, or permission to work remotely” Berman wrote.

[redratt]

A bunch of my money is on hold with my own bank, and I'm being called multiple times a day by bill collectors. For two weeks, the money has been "deposited by tonight".

It hasn't been and I'm opening cases against the people involved, but that doesn't change rent, doesn't change bills.

I'm not at fault, but it doesn't matter.

If you can give, anything helps. 850 dollars are frozen up because of my old banks bullshit. I can't go another month like this. I've already gone weeks eating bare minimum. They've been saying the money will be in tonight for literally 3 weeks and will not transfer it to my new account which is where it should have gone.

Link is here paypal.me/h1231

Everything being done here by the other parties is literally illegal yet im the only one facing any punishment. My electricity and water are in danger of being shut off.

The companies are basically telling me to fuck off and die about it.

[eugenedebs1920]

Democrats call stop work order at CFPB 'illegal' — The Hill

Democrats are calling on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to cancel his stop work order for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)

Think of the audacity! Think of the arrogance! Think of the lack of care for your constituents to call for the end of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau!

I am so sick of these Republican politicians playing on the division they stoked, then the American people are the ones who pay the price while giant corporations and the wealthy benefit. I want to be mad at maga but this hatred was manufactured by Republicans and exasperated beyond belief by orange prick…

I was just going off about how the CFPB fought for me when a credit card company started charging me a monthly rate on a card I NEVER use. All the sudden one day I get a piece of mail saying I owe nearly $500 on a card I haven’t used in over a year. I try calling those f*cks and it’s some (I mean this with no racist undertone but) Indian guy with the thickest accent I can’t understand anything he’s saying and it seems the same is true for him. So I contacted the CFPB, wrote a long letter about junk fees, and hidden charges.

A few weeks later I receive mail from the federal government, I was kinda sh*tting myself like, ‘I didn’t do anything!’. Turns out it’s the CFPB telling me that they took my requests to that credit card company and they agreed to drop the charges and adjust my credit score.

It pisses me off that this is even considered for termination. That an agency which saved the American consumer over 2 billion dollars is on the chopping block.

Republican voters, YOUR HATRED OF LIBERALS IS HURTING YOU, DESTROYING THE SANCTITY OF THE CONSTITUTION AND RELINQUISHING THE FREEDOM THAT WAS SO HARD TO ACHIEVE!!!

STOP VOTING THESE SELF SERVING PRICKS IN TO OFFICE!!

For f*cks sake! Cutting off your nose to spite your face is not “owning” the rest of you…..