EPIC and Coalition Urge the CFPB to Maintain Personal Financial Data Rights

EPIC submitted comments to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in response to the agency’s Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Personal Financial Data Rights Reconsideration. The comments were joined by several consumer protection, digital justice, and privacy organizations. EPIC and the other organizations argued that the CFPB should maintain the strong consumer rights and data privacy and security standards that the Bureau included in the Personal Financial Data Rights (PFDR) rules finalized in October 2024. “The data access and portability provisions included in the PFDR rules gave consumers autonomy over their personal financial information, facilitating frictionless access by consumers to their own financial information,” we state in the comment, “The finalized rules also included some of the strongest privacy and data security protections in federal law, empowering consumers to understand and control who has access to their financial information and for which purposes they may use it.”

EPIC’s comment recommends that the CFPB preserve the strong privacy and data security protections and consumer rights included in the final PFDR rules. We highlighted the sensitive nature of financial information and explained how the final PFDR rules provide robust protection. EPIC also provides recommendations to strengthen the PFDR rules even further.

EPIC has routinely engaged with the CFPB to advocate for strong consumer protections in financial markets. For example, we submitted comments in previous stages of the Personal Financial Data Rights rulemaking process, urged the CFPB to ban medical debt on credit reports, and called on the CFPB the rein in data brokers’ abusive data collection and sharing practices.