Feed: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
Feed Link: https://www.engadget.com/
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Title: The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will now regulate Apple
Pay, Venmo and others

Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2024 13:21:30 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/the-us-cons...

The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is no longer regulating
just banks, now supervising Apple and other companies offering digital
wallets and payment apps. It will focus on companies that handle over 50
million transactions per year and ensure they have "the authority to conduct
proactive examinations to ensure companies are complying with the law in
these and other areas," the bureau said in a statement. "Supervision also is
an important tool for the CFPB to assess risks that can emerge rapidly in
this market, including from outages and other issues that could lead to
millions of consumers losing access to their funds."

The CFPB will supervise Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo and others in the areas
of privacy and surveillance, debanking (losing access to their app without
notice) and errors and fraud. This could provide more options for opting out
of data collection and restricting them from misrepresenting their data
protection practices, among other regulations. "Digital payments have gone
from novelty to necessity and our oversight must reflect this reality. The
rule will help to protect consumer privacy, guard against fraud, and prevent
illegal account closures," said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra. In October, the
CFPB fined Apple and Goldman Sachs $89 million over misleading customers and
not following through with disputed transactions on the Apple Card.

The CFPB originally proposed this setup in November 2023, but the final
policies have changed. Most notably, businesses originally had to process
just five million transactions, rather than the 50 million. It also reduced
the number to just count US dollars, rather than a wider scope. The
supervision will go into effect 30 days following the Federal Register
publication.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-
tech/the-us-consumer-financial-protection-bureau-will-now-regulate-apple-pay-
venmo-and-others-132129928.html?src=rss

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