FTC under fire as credit bureaus sell consumers' data

0 Comments | USA TODAY, December, 2007 | by Byron Acohido and Jon Swartz

SEATTLE -- Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras says her agency has done a credible job regulating the Big Three credit bureaus.

But the boom -- and now bust -- of subprime mortgages is fueling criticism that the FTC under Majoras has given Experian, Equifax and TransUnion too much latitude to profit from the sale of credit data to lenders and consumers.

"Federal agencies that are supposed to be looking out for the consumer are really protecting the companies that do bad things the agencies were set up to prevent," says political commentator Robert Kuttner, author of The Squandering of America: How the Failure of Our Politics Undermines Our Prosperity.

In February, the National Association of Mortgage Brokers lambasted the FTC for...