Without asking if customers wanted to opt in, CFPB has collected and stockpiled from banks more than 600 million credit-card accounts and personal data from millions of home, auto, business and student loans.
For the first time, the government vacuumed up extremely sensitive personal finance information that even the IRS doesn’t collect — including credit scores, performance data on loans, telephone numbers, employment records, even your race and ethnicity, in addition to your date of birth, Social Security number and address. At last count, the CFPB had 12 consumer data-mining programs running.
The main purpose of the databases was to find “statistical patterns” of unfair or racially discriminatory lending to help make cases of bias against private lenders and credit agencies.
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Among other things, inspector general Mark Bialek found that CFPB failed to ensure that the data it was collecting on credit-card accounts and loans followed new cyber-security safeguards in the wake of the massive hacking of the US Office of Personnel Management by the Chinese, which compromised the personal information — including fingerprints — of current and former federal employees. He also found that the bureau was using an “outdated encryption mechanism to secure remote access to its information technology infrastructure.”
“CFPB has not yet fully implemented a number of privacy-control steps and information-security practices,” warned Bialek in a 10-page memo to then-CFPB Director Richard Cordray.
https://nypost.com/2018/04/21/obama-bureaucracy-left-our-private-data-more-vulnerable-than-ever/
For the first time, the government vacuumed up extremely sensitive personal finance information that even the IRS doesn’t collect — including credit scores, performance data on loans, telephone numbers, employment records, even your race and ethnicity, in addition to your date of birth, Social Security number and address. At last count, the CFPB had 12 consumer data-mining programs running.
The main purpose of the databases was to find “statistical patterns” of unfair or racially discriminatory lending to help make cases of bias against private lenders and credit agencies.
[clip]
Among other things, inspector general Mark Bialek found that CFPB failed to ensure that the data it was collecting on credit-card accounts and loans followed new cyber-security safeguards in the wake of the massive hacking of the US Office of Personnel Management by the Chinese, which compromised the personal information — including fingerprints — of current and former federal employees. He also found that the bureau was using an “outdated encryption mechanism to secure remote access to its information technology infrastructure.”
“CFPB has not yet fully implemented a number of privacy-control steps and information-security practices,” warned Bialek in a 10-page memo to then-CFPB Director Richard Cordray.
https://nypost.com/2018/04/21/obama-bureaucracy-left-our-private-data-more-vulnerable-than-ever/