We collect personal information to help decide if you are eligible for our products or services. How we use it is up to us depends on what products and services you have or pay us for want from us. We could give 2 shits take important steps to protect your personal information. We treat is as confidential…but that’s just a word we use to make you feel better. We tell our employees to take care in handling it (but have no idea which ones have nefarious motives). We limit access to those who need it to perform their jobs (but they have other ways of obtaining it that we have no ability to police). Our service providers must also protect it and use it only to meet our business needs (that’s our way of saying we share it with lots of other companies and Sorry…they have their own way of doing things so saying they “must protect it” has no operative affect and really means jack squat). We take steps to protect our systems from unauthorized access (but are helpless, really….we don’t have a reliable way to know if we are even being hacked or not). We comply with all laws that apply to us (the laws are weak, and the onus is on you, the powerless consumer).
This is the gist (minus the sarcasm) of the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection’s regulation language which you all get in the mail from every credit card, insurance policy, leasing company, rewards card and bank … you know, the ones that you tear up and throw out immediately. It requires, among other things, “that financial institutions provide an annual disclosure of their privacy policies to their customers”. It was enacted as The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999 and has been amended once, in 2014, to allow alternative delivery methods for this annual disclosure.
Wow! It’s really kept up with the times!
