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Press Release |
Contact: Earl Lui, 202/462-6262 |
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WASHINGTON - Several major privacy advocacy organizations joined forces with the nation's leading consumer groups this week to issue a sharp warning to Congress that a major rewrite of the nation's banking law threatens to create a "brave new world with greater privacy risks than ever before."
"The financial modernization proposal…will only exacerbate the problem as cross industry mergers involving the sharing and selling of huge amounts of sensitive information becomes the norm," the groups wrote in a letter to members of the Senate Banking Committee. "Financial modernization will become a code phrase for 'privacy violation' unless changes are made to help ensure consumer financial privacy is protected and that consumers have control over with whom information about them is shared or sold."
The public interest groups urged lawmakers to seek immediate changes in the bank modernization bill now before the committee in order to stop what they called an "acceleration of the development of virtually unregulated private databases of personal consumer information." The panel is expected to act on the matter later this week.
The group's proposal: guarantee that any private medical and financial data consumers give the financial services industry remain both secure and private.
The groups also cite recent comments by the nation's top financial regulators, including the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the Comptroller and the Securities and Exchange Commission who have each noted about the gap in public policy in this area.
Signers to the letter include Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, Consumer Federation of America, the U.S. Public Interest Group, Privacy Times, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Privacy International and the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation.
NOTE: To get a copy of the group's letter, please dial our faxback line at 202/238-9258 and request document number 3601
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