Reports on Consumer Protection
The reports below represent a sample of Frontier Group’s work on Consumer Protection. For more of our reports on this and related topics, please visit www.PolicyArchive.org. Full archive coming soon.
Consumers often have little knowledge of, or control over, how companies with which they do business share their personal information. In 2003, California enacted the first-of-its-kind “Shine the Light” law, which gave consumers tools to learn about sharing of their personal information. Still in the Dark reports on California consumers’ experiences with using the law to find out about the sharing of personal information and concludes that both companies and policy-makers need to do a better job of protecting consumers’ privacy.
(December 2007)
In December 2004, Chicago-based Exelon Corporation announced plans to acquire Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), the last remaining New Jersey-based energy company that hasn’t been taken over by a large out-of-state corporation. Consolidation of Power analyzes the risks this deal poses to consumers in New Jersey’s deregulated electricity market—who depend upon vigorous competition between energy suppliers to get a fair deal for reliable service.
(November 2005)
Federal regulation riddled with loopholes has left large bank conglomerates and other financial institutions with too much leeway to share consumers’ private information and too little responsibility for the consequences. Financial Privacy in the States documents the growing concerns that Americans have about financial privacy, presents a survey of state laws that have helped fill regulatory gaps in the financial privacy sphere, and provides an estimate of the economic burden consumers currently bear as a result of inadequate privacy safeguards.
(February 2004)
The Northeast blackout of 2003 showed yet again that today's cumbersome, centralized power grid linked to fossil fuel-fired and nuclear power plants is a costly, unreliable and environmentally destructive anachronism. After the Blackout, a paper issued three weeks after the blackout cut power to 50 million people in the U.S. and Canada, distills the lessons of the blackout and calls for the creation of a decentralized, resilient and consumer-focused electric system that taps the nation’s ample potential for energy efficiency, clean renewable power, and distributed generation.
(September 2003)