Consumer Protection

Facebook announced today that earlier this week, "attackers exploited a vulnerability in Facebook’s code that impacted “View As”, a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else. This allowed them to steal Facebook access tokens which they could then use to take over people’s accounts."

A new federal law eliminates fees for getting and removing credit freezes in Texas and across the country at the three nationwide credit bureaus on September 21st. The consumer advocacy group TexPIRG recommends getting credit freezes, not the similar locks offered by the bureaus, to prevent new account identity theft.

In 2003, TexPIRG led the effort in the Texas legislature to pass one of the nation's first laws creating security freezes. However, the law required consumers to pay $10 per freeze per credit bureau, for a total of $30. In the 2017 Equifax data breach, Attorney General Ken Paxton says that 12 million Texans had their information stolen.

"It’s about time the credit bureaus stopped charging us for the right to control our own information. We didn’t give them permission to collect or sell our information in the first place," said Bay Scoggin, TexPIRG’s State Director

King Bio Inc. issued the second significant voluntary recall since late July of their homeopathic drugs on Wednesday. Safety concerns over homeopathic drugs extend beyond King Bio as over the past several years, the FDA has issued recalls to several companies for a variety of health products from zinc-containing intranasal medicine to asthma drugs with toxic ingredients. 

Here is our statement on Congress allowing the deadline to pass without repealing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's payday lending rule.

We should be able to trust that the products we buy are safe — especially ones our families use every day, applied directly to our lips. However, today U.S. PIRG Education Fund released a consumer guide entitled “Kiss Off,” which contains examples of lipsticks, lip balms, and children’s lip products which contain ingredients linked to cancer, hormone disruption, and reproductive problems. Popular brands such as Maybelline, L'Oréal, and ChapStick made the list.