To what extent do you cherish privacy?

For over a year there has been a lot of brouhaha about our government spying on us via phone calls. Congress put the kibosh on that last month passing the USA Freedom Act to protect Americans' privacy. Privacy advocates prevailed over anti-terrorism policing.

Do you cherish your privacy and to what extent? Why is it not OK for a government agency like the NSA to collect meta data on phone calls while allowing a newer agency to collect all your credit card transaction details as well as your other financial data?

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has 12 data-mining programs gathering monthly activity on 600 million personal credit-card accounts. By 2016 CFPB expects to monitor 95 percent of all credit-card transactions.

CFPB also gathers data on 22 million mortgages, 5.5 million student loans, 2 million bank accounts with overdraft fees, hundreds of thousands of car sales, and your credit scores according to a recent Wall Street Journal article.

So what gives them the right to snoop on your finances? The Dodd-Frank Act passed after the last financial crisis expanded Big Brother without any concern for your privacy. Big financial institutions and poor government agency oversight was the root causes of our Great Recession yet your personal financial affairs has now come under the umbrella of financial oversight.

Can Congress fix it by cutting off funds for this obvious overreach by the Feds? No, CFPB is only accountable to the Federal Reserve receiving a fixed portion of that independent agency's budget.

Want to protect your financial privacy? Ask your Congressional representatives to change the Dodd-Frank Act making CFPB subject to the same annual appropriations process as all other government agencies.

Without that change in CFPB funding, Congress will have no say when trying to protect your financial privacy.

Mike Tennis

Sleepy Hollow