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June 05, 2008
More miscellanous roundup--Internet spying, car fraud and more
Over at Slashdot, an item reports that Wikileaks has posted an internal British Telecom report on the secret trials of the extremely controversial deep packet inspection technology from the company Phorm. ISPs plan to use it to "deliver targeted advertising based on a user's browsing habits."FTC has a new website on telephone fraud, www.ftc.gov/phonefraud in both English and Spanish. Rosemary Shahan of CARS has commissioned a new Youtube video that in only 7 minutes, explains the major auto fraud scams. Consumer Federation of America funded it, CARS produced it and it was made by the San Francisco-based Conscious Youth Media Crew. Certainly worth a look if you're thinking about buying a car. A proposed settlement in a lawsuit over the credit bureau Trans Union's (TU release) long-running and insolent violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act's prohibition on using credit reports for target marketing would offer consumers 6 or 9 months of free credit monitoring, depending on what other legal rights they choose to give up. As I have previously stated, I'd never pay for over-priced credit monitoring, but I MIGHT take it for free. We've asked prominent consumer attorneys to review the proposal to see if it is truly pro-consumer. Trans Union didn't stop breaking the law because of this lawsuit, it stopped in 2001 when the DC Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the FTC's order telling it to stop, and then the Supreme Court refused to hear its last desperate appeal. Even today, TU still insists its tawdry practices that were found by the FTC and the U.S. courts to have broken the law somehow did not break the law. Go figure. But at least some good may come of it many years later. I mentioned the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) earlier. Here's the lede to a great Huffington Post blog by Jamie Love of KEI:
Today in Geneva Switzerland, at an undisclosed location, the US government, the European Commission, Japan and a handful of other countries will meet in a secret negotiation on a new treaty. The working name is the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a name that masks the much broader subject matter, and one that was deliberately chosen to intimidate and discourage politicians from expressing opposition to provisions that undermine civil rights and privacy, and which many say will change the substantive rights the public has to use copyrighted works or inventions.
Posted by Ed Mierzwinski at June 5, 2008 11:29 AM
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