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March 21, 2007
Consumer Blog Roundup: Old and New
What with 10 days in Europe and all, I am behind on checking out the consumer blogs. So, here are a few excellent posts from the last few weeks: Over at Credit Slips, the consumer credit and bankruptcy professor blog: Check out Angie Littwin's post on on her own empirical research into the attitudes of low-income women toward credit card debt: In the paper, I build off their ideas to develop a proposal for "self-directed credit cards," which would allow consumers to pre-commit to set levels of credit-card usage and avoid the temptation to spend or borrow more in the heat of the purchasing moment. MORE:
Also at Credit Slips, Elizabeth Warren recently pointed out that people are offered well more than their incomes in credit card offers each year: If the average card offers is about $5,000 in pre-approved credit, that about $365,000 in offers for every American household--or about $1000 a day, every day of the year. By comparison, median household income is about $46,000, or about $127 a day. It wouldn't be unreasonable to speculate that many families are offered about seven times their annual incomes in credit card debt.
Meanwhile, over at the Consumer Law and Policy blog, which includes blogs by consumer advocates, consumer lawyers and professors:Brian Wolfman's blog entry The "Check Float" Is On Its Way Out, comments on a recent column by the Washington Post's Michelle Singletary describing the latest technological advance making it harder to "float" checks.Also, Greg Beck's entry Wal-Mart Uses Digital Millennium Copyright Act Against Consumer Blog explains how the overly-broad DMCA [which of course has also been used effectively by copyright holders to scare colleges and some ISPs into assisting private firm efforts against alleged illegal-music downloaders] is being used to chill free speech on the Internet. And Jeff Sovern has a nice piece on one of the main drivers of identity theft: the lack of incentives for merchants or credit bureaus to slow down credit transactions.
And, over at his Digital Destiny blog, Jeff Chester has some prolific and thoughtful posts: In an essay-like piece called Building Capacity for Social Justice in Web 2.0: How to Foster a Public Interest "Triple Play", he urges activists, policymakers and the funding community to take ten pro-active steps to "take advantage of the significant changes transforming the U.S. (and global) media system." In a piece Will the Interactive Advertising Bureau 'Mess-up' Branding Online By Opposing Privacy Safeguards? he criticizes the disingenuous lobbying efforts of IAB and its member online advertising firms: "If Congress protected consumers with online marketing safeguards, warned IAB, it would threaten the nature of the Internet itself."
Posted by Ed Mierzwinski at March 21, 2007 06:14 AM
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