CFPB to Call for Expansion of Regulation of Tracking and Selling Personal Data

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) will propose new regulations directed at companies that track and sell people’s personal data.

The proposal will be announced Tuesday (Aug. 15) at the White House and will broaden the scope of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a law governing the privacy of consumer data provided to lenders, by applying it to more companies, Reuters reported Tuesday.

It will call for stricter enforcement of the use of data derived from payment histories, personal incomes, and criminal records, according to the report. Companies will also be prohibited from disclosing “credit header data,” which includes personal details like names, addresses and Social Security numbers.

Reached for comment by PYMNTS, the CFPB provided a statement in which CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said: “The CFPB will be taking steps to ensure that modern-day data brokers in the surveillance industry know that they cannot engage in illegal collection and sharing of our data.”

The push for more privacy protections was spurred in part by President Joe Biden’s call for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to protect the data privacy of women seeking reproductive healthcare, according to the Reuters report. In response, the FTC sued an Idaho company for selling mobile phone geolocation data which could be traced to places like abortion clinics, churches and addiction treatment centers.

The CFPB’s inquiry into the conduct of credit bureaus and screening firms also revealed that they received information from data brokers about consumers in financial distress and then targeted them with predatory debt products, the report said.

“Reports about monetization of sensitive information — everything from the financial details about members of the U.S. military to lists of specific people experiencing dementia — are particularly worrisome when data is powering ‘artificial intelligence’ and other automated decision-making about our lives,” Chopra said in the statement provided to PYMNTS.

The CFPB began an investigation into companies that track and collect consumer data in March, saying at the time that it “wants to understand the full scope and breadth of data brokers and their business practices, their impact on the daily lives of consumers, and whether they are all playing by the same rules.”