пятница, 4 сентября 2015 г.

uCorinthian Students Continue To Wait For Debt Relief As Department Of Ed. Reviews More Than 7,800 Claimsr


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  • healdheaderThe tens of thousands of students seeking debt relief from the federal government after for-profit education chain Corinthian Colleges Inc. closed its Everest University, WyoTech and Heald College campuses, will have to wait a little longer, the Department of Education said Thursday as it provided an update on the number of federal student loans it has discharged and that are currently under consideration.

    The Washington Post reports that the Dept. has received 4,140 claims for borrower defense discharge since it announced in June that it would provide relief for students who attended (after June 20, 2014) the 30 CCI campuses that closed in April.

    Those reviews are taking longer than one might expect as the team has to analyze state laws for each claim.

    Under the law, a borrower defense to repayment provides loan forgiveness to students if their school committed fraud or broke laws.

    Independent monitor for the relief process, Joseph Smith, said during the press conference that his team of four attorneys is reviewing claims where the “facts and law are clear,” such as those who attended Heald Colleges in California, Hawaii and Oregon, the Post reports.

    Nearly 1,992 claims are tied to those schools, which were the center of an April Dept. of Education fine against CCI for lying about job placement rates to students. Smith estimates that it could be at least three months before those claims are resolved.

    As for students who attended other CCI closed schools, there is no specific timeline for settlement.

    “One reason this is taking time is we’re trying to be careful about the basis to create classes,” Smith said. “But wherever we can, we will try to treat those claims alike.”

    In addition to the borrower defense discharges, the Dept. announced it had received 7,815 claims for closed school discharges, 3,128 of which have been approved.

    In all, those resolved cases involved about $40 million in federal student loans, the Post reports.

    While students continue to wait for their claims to be reviewed, Business Insider reports that 7,000 have been placed in forbearance or stopped loan collection status. However, while the students aren’t currently making payments, their debts continue to rack up interest.

    Ultimately, the Department says it has no idea how much it will cost to forgive the student loan debt of eligible former Corinthian students.

    Since 2010, students at the schools have borrowers about $3.2 billion, so the Dept. of Education’s tab could be significant.

    “We’re identifying a number of issues, a number problems, with the law and regulation that we hope to square away so that we can better protect students,” Education Under Secretary Ted Mitchell said. “This is something we hope to take up with Congress.”

    The review panel’s next progress report is expected to be released in mid-October.

    It may be a long time before many Corinthian students get debt relief [The Washington Post]
    The US is forgiving $40 million in student debt taken on by thousands of students [Business Insider]



ribbi
  • by Ashlee Kieler
  • via Consumerist


uKraft Adds 335K More Cases Of Cheese Singles To Recall Over Packaging Choking Hazardr


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  • After recalling 36,000 cases of Kraft Singles out of concern that consumers could choke on parts of the film covering individual slices, Kraft Heinz has expanded the recall to include 335,000 more cases of cheese for the same packaging reason.

    The company says the problem is more widespread than first believed, with 10 times more of the product involved than was included in the initial recall. In July, Kraft announced it was pulling 36,000 cases of American cheese singles after reports that a thin strip of the film covering individual slices could stick to the food and potentially cause someone to choke.

    At that time, Kraft said it’d received three reports of customers choking, and had received seven other complaints about the packaging. Since then, Kraft says in a press release that it’s received two more new reports of customers choking.

    The new recall includes 1-, 3- and 4-pound Kraft Singles American and White American cheese product with “Best When Used by Dates” ranging from December 2016 to March 2016, followed by the Manufacturing Code S54 or S55. Both those codes are stamped on both the outer box and individual packages.

    The products were sold in the U.S., Puerto Rico, and 10 other countries and territories: Anguilla, the Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, Grand Cayman, Netherlands Antilles, St. Kitts and Nevis, South Korea, St. Lucia, and the British Virgin Islands.

    The July recall was limited to products shipped to retailers in the U.S., Puerto Rico and Grand Cayman with “Best By” dates of Dec. 29, 2016 to Jan. 4, 2016. For a complete list of products, <strong>click here.

    Only products with the S54 and S55 codes, which refer to the two production lines on which the impacted product was made, are included in this recall. The “Best When Used By” Date and Manufacturing Code are stamped on both the outer box and the individual packages.

    Consumers should return the product to the store where it was purchased for a full refund.



ribbi
  • by Mary Beth Quirk
  • via Consumerist


ur


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  • Here are seven of the best photos that readers added to the Consumerist Flickr Pool in the last week, picked for usability in a Consumerist post or for just plain neatness.

    Want to see your pictures on our site? Our Flickr pool is the place where Consumerist readers upload photos for possible use in future Consumerist posts. Just be a registered Flickr user, go here, and click “Join Group?” up on the top right. Choose your best photos, then click “send to group” on the individual images you want to add to the pool.



ribbi
  • by Laura Northrup
  • via Consumerist


четверг, 3 сентября 2015 г.

ueBay Seller Who Sued Customers For Bad Feedback Orderd To Pay $19,250 In Legal Feesr


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  • You may remember that back in 2013, an eBay seller filed a lawsuit against a customer who left him accurate negative feedback, claiming that he hadn’t actually read his own suit when the company’s actions led to Internet backlash. Now the case has finally been resolved, with a judge ordering the seller to pay $19,000 in attorneys’ fees to the local lawyers who took the customer’s case pro bono.

    The eBay customer left bad feedback when her package arrived with insufficient postage, and the company filed a libel suit in its home state as a tactic to make her delete the feedback, since she was unlikely to travel there or hire a local attorney. This wasn’t the first time the store had filed this type of lawsuit, observers figured out, and ultimately the case led to multiple sanctions trials and the order to pay legal fees.

    Sales at the eBay store fell, but it is still in business. Public Citizen’s Paul Levy reports that the company has changed its name twice since this story blew up in the spring of 2013.

    The case and the Internet’s negative reaction to it remains a top search result for the company’s original name, MedExpress, and for its attorneys; maybe, Levy speculates, the case will serve as a warning to people who want to file lawsuits for damages to have bad feedback taken down, and for attorneys who would consider taking these cases.

    Med Express v. Nicholls [Public Citizen]



ribbi
  • by Laura Northrup
  • via Consumerist


uWaze Accused Of Stealing Map Data From Competing Traffic Appr


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  • waze-fullHow do you catch someone who you think is stealing your map data? Just put locations on the map that don’t exist, and then look for those locations to show up on the alleged thief’s maps. That’s what traffic-alerting app PhantomAlert did when it believed that competitor Waze was stealing its location database. Now PhantomAlert is suing Waze, which has since been purchased by Google.

    PhantomAlert alleges that Waze approached the company in 2010 to propose an arrangement where the two companies would share data about points of interest (businesses, landmarks) as well as traffic and map data. They declined the arrangement, and thought both companies would just go on their way.

    PhantomAlert alleges that Waze then began copying information from their maps, including fake items that they deliberately placed in the Points of Interest database. “Waze stole PhantomALERT’s database when Waze could not get it legally, and then sold itself to Google for over $1 billion,” the company’s attorney said in a statement.

    PhantomAlert works with standalone GPS devices as well as mobile devices, and charges a subscription fee. Waze is free to use, supporting itself with location-based ads served up on the road. PhantomAlert also alleges that Waze’s parent company, Google, uses data that originated with PhantomAlert in its own maps and other services.

    RELATED:
    Smartphone Traffic Apps: Are You Gambling With Your Commute?



ribbi
  • by Laura Northrup
  • via Consumerist


uSoft Drink Companies Fund Fitness Programs, Ungrateful Governments Campaign Against Soda Anywayr


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  • Soft drink companies have an important message to get across to the public: their products can be part of a healthy lifestyle when used occasionally, and when you burn off that Mountain Dew with regular exercise. They’ve even been nice enough to fund fitness programs in many cities, and those ungrateful cities respond by proposing taxes and warning labels for their products.

    Take San Antonio: the city has a type 2 diabetes rate that’s double the average in this country, and the city government resisted anti-soda ad campaigns aimed at the public. The county where San Antonio is embarked on its own campaign, which features a guy gobbling sugar packets while sitting at a counter in a diner. The message: if you wouldn’t eat 16 sugar packets along with your meal, why are you sipping a 20-ounce soda?

    Some officials are uncomfortable with the idea of telling residents what to eat, even if it’s only a public-health or education campaign. Yet in San Antonio, the Coca-Cola-funded exercise initiatives didn’t lower the obesity rate among adults, or the percentage of people who say they drink at least one soft drink daily.

    Sodas, Health Officials Duke It Out City by City [Wall Street Journal]



ribbi
  • by Laura Northrup
  • via Consumerist


uPitfalls Of Big Data: Test Prep Company Charges By Geography, Ends Up Charging More By Racer


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  • Many teenagers’ parents want to give their kids every possible advantage when it comes to the SATs. They pony up a few thousand dollars and buy Junior a test-prep course. It’s expensive, but at least it’s the same kind of expensive for everyone, right? Well, no, it’s not. And worst of all: there sure is an awfully high correlation between the race of the family doing the buying and the price that they get charged.

    ProPublica crunched the numbers and found that The Princeton Review, one of the most popular test-prep companies, not only sells the same product at different prices depending where you start from — but also that Asian customers, no matter where they live, are likely paying the most.

    While higher-income areas generally get charged more for the same package, ProPublica found, the correlation isn’t just that straightforward. New York and D.C. residents pay the most, but customers in regions with high densities of Asian residents were likely to see the highest price — even if those regions are themselves low-income:

    When it came to getting the highest prices, living in a ZIP code with a high median income or a large Asian population seemed to make the greatest difference.

    The analysis showed that higher income areas are twice as likely to receive higher prices than the general population. For example, wealthy suburbs of Washington D.C. are charged higher prices. But that isn’t always the case: Residents of affluent neighborhoods in Dallas are charged the lowest price, $6,600.

    Customers in areas with a high density of Asian residents were 1.8 times as likely to be offered higher prices, regardless of income. For instance, residents of the gritty industrial city of Westminster, California, which is half Asian with a median income below most, were charged the second-highest price for the Premier tutoring service.

    The Princeton Review, of course, almost certainly isn’t explicitly setting out deliberately to charge customers different prices by race. In addition to being a scummy thing to do and looking very bad PR-wise, that is also very illegal.

    Indeed, the company denied it strenuously. In a statement to Pro Publica, The Princeton Review said, “To equate the incidental differences in impact that occur from this type of geographic based pricing that pervades all American commerce with discrimination misconstrues both the literal, legal and moral meaning of the word.”

    But even if the outcome isn’t intended, that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

    Race-based price discrimination may not be the goal, but it is still a real, unfortunate side-effect of the algorithms the Princeton Review is using to set different prices. The publication bases its pricing on ZIP code. They told ProPublica that pricing is based on the “costs of running our business and the competitive attributes of the given market.” Translate that “competitive attributes” into English, and it basically means that if demand for their services is particularly high in an area, they can charge more without losing customers.

    The Princeton Review is using algorithms — theoretically neutral pieces of software based on math — to make assumptions and judgements about who wants, and can pay for, what. But those algorithms, like thousands of others that millions of us are classified by every day, are designed by humans that bring their own assumptions and biases with them into the code.

    It’s not just SAT prep. The reliance on algorithms to decide who customers are and how you should treat them is pervasive and growing. Sites will use anything from your IP address to your browsing history to decide anything from what search results you should get to what credit card offers you should see.

    But the challenge of relying on all those numbers to do the thinking for you is exactly what the Princeton Review ran into here: disparate impact. When you try to privilege or minimize some non-protected attributes — like ZIP code — you can end up prioritizing or deprioritizing consumers by legally-protected statuses, too. If Orbitz thinks Mac users want to pay more for hotels, that’s crappy but not illegal. If The Princeton Review thinks that Asian-American families should pay more for their services than white families, well, that’s a whole other problem.

    But in general, right now, the disparate impacts of algorithms on everyone who uses digital services are still, as consumer advocate Ed Mierzwinski put it last year, the “Wild West.” Regulation has not yet caught up with the ability for vendors to discriminate — intentionally or not — against legally-protected populations with a single click.

    The Tiger Mom Tax: Asians Are Nearly Twice as Likely to Get a Higher Price from Princeton Review [Pro Publica]
    When Big Data Becomes Bad Data [Pro Publica]



ribbi
  • by Kate Cox
  • via Consumerist