Daily Archives: 19 April 2024

Financial Institutions Retreating from ESG Claptrap

Posted on by
Reply

Or are they? Are they, maybe, simply moving to disguise their ESG claptrap in other ways or only altering their rhetoric without materially altering their censorious behavior?

States have responded [to the explosion of ESG irrelevances] with a barrage of legislation that restricts the use of ESG factors or targets entities that boycott certain industries.
Financial institutions are reacting to these state-level actions with what appears to be a retreat from their commitment to ESG, but there are questions if they are changing or just regrouping the efforts under new names.

One way to control for financial institutions’ weasel-wording around those State-level bars (whether those institutions are looking sub rosa to avoid the bars or not) would be to require financial institutions that decline a loan application, or cancel an account, or otherwise restrict one relative to similar accounts of other customers is the following.

Require financial institutions to explain their adverse actions to their customers in concrete, measurable terms supported by including in their letters of explanation the hard, factual data they used to form their adverse actions, along with the concretely termed concerns the financial institution claims to have toward its adversely affected customer/prospective customer. Simply asserting that the enterprise/individual doesn’t align with the financial institution’s values doesn’t cut it. Which value? How? Show them the hard data supporting the assertion. Explain how any data provided by the enterprise/individual falls short.

There are no serious compliance difficulty/cost concerns here. The financial institution taking the adverse action already has collected and organized the data and concerns underlying its action; the institution has merely to copy/paste those materials into the letter advising its customer/prospective customer of the adverse action.

Concerns Regarding “Unreasonable” Searches

Posted on by
Reply

There are concerns that a bill under consideration in the House, the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act, goes too far in protecting us Americans from 4th Amendment violations by the government at the expense of our counterintelligence capabilities.

The bill…would ban the government from buying information on Americans from data brokers. This would include many things in the cloud of digital exhaust most Americans leave behind online, from information on the websites they visit to credit-card information, health information, and political opinions.

Worse, goes the argument, the bill

would prohibit the US government from buying digital information that would remain available to the likes of China and Russia.

That last is a non sequitur, though. The fact that the data are readily available to our enemies doesn’t legitimize its collection by our government, which has Constitutional bars against most kinds of searches. It’s further the case that if we can’t be secure against the unwarranted [sic] intrusions of our own government, how can we expect our own government to keep us secure from the intrusions of foreign governments, especially enemy foreign governments?

There also is a misunderstanding buried in the claim regarding that digital exhaust [that] most Americans leave behind online. A significant fraction of that “digital exhaust” is not voluntary; it’s left behind as a condition of doing business with those enterprises that require collection of the data. Some of those data are legitimately needed by businesses: credit card account numbers if payment is being offered via credit card, shipping addresses so the seller can deliver the product, personal names so the seller can be sure of the credit card numbers and shipping addresses, and the like. Other data are demanded by the business as a condition of doing business with the customer for reasons unique to the specific enterprise.

Better would be to bar the sale, rather than bar the purchase, of such data.

That sale, too, should be barred universally, not just with respect to our government, within the following boundaries. All data that an enterprise demands be collected in order to do business needs to be barred from sale or any other transfer, to any other entity, whether government or not. There should be no default position or opt in or out; the sale or transfer of these data should be prohibited. Government legitimately can still access those data on presentation in court of a probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the [data] to be searched, and the [data] to be seized. Voluntarily left data should require affirmative opt-in before those data can be sold or transferred. Failure to choose should be taken as not opting in—the enterprise cannot sell of transfer the data.