Add to the list of government agencies snooping, prying and stockpiling information about you: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This one is quite thorough, too:
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform, is collecting reams of data on your bill-paying and spending habits.
In fact, the Obama administration is compiling a massive database of personal information, including monthly credit card, mort gage, car and other payments.
The data will be warehoused by private contractors and shared with other federal agencies and Congress, as well as researchers in the field.
What could possibly go wrong?
CFPB has failed to adequately protect the data it’s amassing from major banks and consumer credit reporting firms from unauthorized disclosures, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warns.
In fact, CFPB’s own inspector general recently cited “weaknesses” in its security program. His findings were corroborated by a Government Accountability Office report that expressed concerns about CFPB’s data security.
Companies that provide the confidential data worry they could be sued by consumers for breaches.
There’s a happy thought. And unlike other government snoopers, who say they only gather information in large, anonymous piles that can’t possibly be linked to any one person (until it is), the CFPB’s data offers more room for mischief:
CFPB insists it’s working within the Dodd-Frank law. Cordray assured Congress in a recent letter that “we are taking pains to protect privacy by avoiding the collection of information that readily identifies individuals.”
But grouping financial accounts by name and other personal identifiers is key to CFPB’s goal of a “comprehensive repository,” or master database, of individual credit transactions. Data sets for mortgages, auto loans and credit cards are separate now. The only way to merge them into individual profiles is to match up names. Even if CFPB uses proxies, it runs the risk of re-identification.
