For example (emphasis ours):

Congress is taking up legislation this week that will wipe out arbitration provisions in hundreds of millions of consumer contracts — for everything from credit-card agreements to cell phones to health-insurance policies, even a contract for the purchase of a kitchen sink.

Holy sh*t! Not the f*cking kitchen sink! I'm moving to Canada this time, I swear to God!

Anyway, in our august and respected opinion (ha ha ha ha) this WSJ piece was misrepresenting the real issue at hand — whether or not arbitration should be mandatory. The piece of legislation she refers to does not remove your ability to enter into arbitration, a fact that she manages to ignore. She also refutes generalized "anti-arbitration" arguments with studies paid for by the American Arbitration Association — the people who most directly benefit from forcing consumers to use their services.

We could have written a response to the piece, but some kind consumer lawyers sent us one that had been written already and we like it. So, we're just going to link to that and save ourselves some time. In short, however, our point is this: We think the market should be able to decide whether or not arbitration is a better deal for consumers, and in order for it to decide it has to be able to choose.

There's nothing wrong with arbitration, if that's what you want to do, but you should not be forced into it by your employer, your nursing home, or in order to purchase something. Especially a kitchen sink.

Big Business Wants You Out Of The Courtroom [Cranky Greg]
Arbitration Works Better Than Lawsuits [WSJ]

If such a list became popular, would it reduce the ad model of the web to the blind shotgun blasts of TV advertising? That would suck—personally, if I'm going to see an ad, I want it to be about something that interests me. I don't like the idea of a third-party harvesting my data and packaging it with other users' data to profit from it, but I do think targeted advertising is an improvement over traditional advertising. Besides, how would such a list work with the rapidly evolving technologies used for data tracking? NebuAd's deep-packet-sniffing collects lots of detailed info but doesn't connect it directly to an ISP customer's account—would that be permissible?

Being a smart consumer is deeply relevant to this issue. Ultimately, the individual consumer has to understand the basics of online advertising before choosing to engage in any online behavior. Telemarketing, and to a lesser extent junk mail, take public info that by necessity has to be public (telephone numbers and addresses, for example), then exploits that info to contact you without your permission. When you're online, however, you're leaving a data trail behind you like heat exhaust, and anyone who knows how to read it can gain information on you. But you can also learn to reduce that data trail, or cloak it, or even disguise it as a different data trail. It's an arms race, but then everything in the information age is.

When companies try to take control of your data trail from you—like what Facebook did with its Beacon program—then we have a real problem; suddenly your self-protection schemes no longer work and you're left open to privacy loss. So far the public has reacted swiftly and decisively against such overreaching stunts.

My hope is that the public side of the market remains a more efficient way of dealing with company misbehavior—and that Average Web User X gets over his technophobia (or more likely plain disinterest) and learns the basics of online privacy if he values his part in the demographic data pool so much.

"Privacy Advocates: Consumer Education Isn't Enough" [PC World]

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"UK advertising-tech fight shows complexity of privacy battle" [Associated Press]
(Photo: Getty)

What did the Bush administration do in response? Did it reverse course and decide to take action to halt this burgeoning scourge? As Americans are now painfully aware, with hundreds of thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure and our markets reeling, the answer is a resounding no.

Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye.

Let me explain: The administration accomplished this feat through an obscure federal agency called the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). The OCC has been in existence since the Civil War. Its mission is to ensure the fiscal soundness of national banks. For 140 years, the OCC examined the books of national banks to make sure they were balanced, an important but uncontroversial function. But a few years ago, for the first time in its history, the OCC was used as a tool against consumers.

But the unanimous opposition of the 50 states did not deter, or even slow, the Bush administration in its goal of protecting the banks. In fact, when my office opened an investigation of possible discrimination in mortgage lending by a number of banks, the OCC filed a federal lawsuit to stop the investigation.

Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime [Washington Post] (Thanks, AB!)

I don't even know what Kohl's is. I'm guessing some sort of mass-crap superstore, like Best Buy or Target or T.J. Maxx or a weird amalgam of all of those and it doesn't really matter because last Friday they opened at 4 a.m. for the mad rush of Black Friday shoppers, because if there's one thing you want to do when your body is groggy and sleep tugs at your heart and your dreams have turned vacant and sad, it's grope cheap waffle makers before sunrise.

Until there's a profound shift in how we approach the world, in how we view the goods we buy, in how Black Friday and the rape of Canada are grossly, inextricably connected, we cannot effect much change. Much as I love the green movement and the Buy Nothing movement and the Slow Food movement and all the rest, in the face of the countless billions still to be made by raping the planet for oil, they're merely the equivalent of trying to water the rainforest with an eyedropper.