COMMENT 

CapitaiOnea 

Capital One Financial Corporation 

1680 Capital One Drive 

McLean, VA 22102 

May 29,2007 

Office of the Comptroller of the Currency 

250 E Street, SW 

Mail Stop 1-5 

Washington, DC 20219 

Attention: Docket No. OCC-2007-0003 

www .regula tions.gov 

Ms. Jennifer J. Johnson 

Secretary 

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve 

System 

20th Street and Constitution A venue, NW 

Washington, DC 20551 

Attention: Docket No. R-1280 

regs.comments@federalreserve.gov 

Mr. Robert E. Feldman 

Executive Secretary 

Attention: Comments 

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation 

550 171h Street, NW 

Washington, DC 20429 

RIN 3064-AD16 

comments@fdic.gov 

Regulation Comments 

Chief Counsel's Office 

Office ofThrift Supervision 

1700 G Street, NW 

Washington, DC 20552 

Attention: Docket No. OTS-2007-0005 

www .regulations .gov 

Ms. Mary Rupp 

Secretary of the Board 

National Credit Union Administration 

1775 Duke Street 

Alexandria, VA 22314-3428 

RIN 3133-AC84 

regcomments@ncua.gov 

Federal Trade Commission 

Office of the Secretary 

Room 135 (Annex C) 

600 Pennsylvania A venue, NW 

Washington, DC 20580 

Attention: File No. P034815 

secure.commentworks.com/ftc-modelform 

Ms. Eileen Donovan 

Acting Secretary of the Commission 

Commodities Futures Trading Commission 

Three Lafayette Centre 

1155 21st Street, NW 

Washington, DC 20581 

RIN 3038-AC04 

secretary@cftc.gov 

Ms. Nancy M. Morris 

Secretary 

Securities and Exchange Commission 

1 00 F Street, NE 

Washington, DC 20549-1090 

Attention: File No. S?-09-07 

rule-comments@sec .gov 

Re: Interagency Proposal for Model Privacy Form Under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley 

Act 
Capital One Comments on Model Privacy Form 

Page 2 . 

Ladies and Gentlemen: 

Capital One Financial Corporation ("Capital One") is pleased to submit comments 

on the federal financial regulatory agencies' ("the Agencies") Interagency Proposal for 

Model Privacy Form Under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. 1 Capital One commends the 

Agencies for their work on this important project. 

Capital One Financial .Corporation is a financial holding company whose principal 

subsidiaries, Capital One Bank, Capital One, F.S.B., Capital One Auto Finance, Inc., 

Capital One, N.A., and North Fork Bank, offer a broad spectrum of financial products 

and services to consumers, small business, and commercial clients. As of March 31, 

2007, Capital One's subsidiaries collectively had $87.7 billion in deposits and $142 

billion in managed loans outstanding, and operated more than 720 retail bank branches. 

Capital One is a Fortune 500 company and is included in the S&P 100 Index. 

Capital One supports the Agencies' objective of creating a standard privacy form 

that can be widely used and hence is more accessible to consumers than the current 

variety of forms used by thousands of financial institutions, including Capital One, no 

two of which may be the same. One of the great strengths ofthe "Schumer box" 

disclosures for credit card solicitations is that the disclosures are arranged in a 

standardized form that consumers can easily refer to for account terms that are important 

to them, such as the annual percentage rate. Creating a privacy form of comparable 

accessibility and uniformity would be a major achievement. 

The principal obstacle to achieving that objective in the form proposed by the 

Agencies (the "Model Form") is the requirement for many financial institutions, 

including Capital One, that the form occupy three sheets of paper rather than a single 

sheet as currently used by Capital One and many other financial institutions. The 

production and mailing costs of implementing the three-sheet requirement in our credit 

card and auto finance businesses alone would likely exceed $5 million a year. Reducing 

the Form from three sheets to two - which could be done by permitting double-sided 

printing, or, within the framework ofthe current proposal, by not engaging in any 

information-sharing that triggers an opt-out right - might cut those costs in half. 

We believe that the greater bulk of the Model Form may be an impediment to 

consumers as well. While printing the Form on one side of three sheets would 

undoubtedly facilitate a consumer in laying the sheets side-by-side to study their contents 

together, we think few consumers would actually do that, because they would be unlikely 

to study the Form at all. In our experience, a document with greater bulk is less likely, 

not more likely, to be read and absorbed. We submit that consumer testing of this 

specific point - impact on consumers of a bigger document rather than a smaller onewill be necessary in order to assess the effectiveness of the Model Form or alternatives to 

it. 

1 72 Fed. Reg. 14940 (March 29, 2007). 
Capital One Comments on Model Privacy Form 

Page 3 

Operational costs of the magnitude described above are a substantial obstacle to 

adoption of the Form, even when weighed against the safe harbor that the Agencies offer. 

The result will likely be substantially less adoption of the Model Form. We think it likely 

that a minority, and possibly a small minority, of the privacy forms actually sent would 

be in the form that the Agencies propose.

2 

In our view, that result would substantially defeat the purpose of using the Form. 

The Form is most valuable if most ofthe notices that consumers receive are in the same 

form, so that they know where to look for information they care about and can absorb it 

easily. If the Model Form is simply one among many forms that consumers receive- and 

a much bulkier form at that- we think it likely that the Form will be ignored to the same 

extent that the others are. We therefore see great value in revisiting the Model so that it 

can be produced on a single sheet of paper, even if that means compromising on some of 

the perceived virtues of the currently proposed model. 

We appreciate that accommodating the concerns above would require substantial 

reassessment and redesign of the Model Form, but we believe that such reassessment and 

redesign are necessary to create a form that will actually be used by both financial 

institutions and consumers- and we also believe that the goals sought to be achieved by 

the Model Form are sufficiently important that the effort would be worth it. As an 

intermediate goal, the Agencies could improve the Sample Clauses that were found 

wanting in the most recent testing. 

* * * 

Capital One appreciates the opportunity to comment on the proposed Model Form. 

If you have questions about this matter and our comments, please call me at 703-720-

2255. 

Sincerely, 

Is/ 

Christopher T. Curtis 

Associate General Counsel 

Policy Affairs 

2 "The Agencies expect .. . that small financial institutions . .. would be relatively more likely to rely on 

the model privacy form than larger institutions." 72 Fed. Reg. at 14957. We believe that the majority of 

accounts are held by larger institutions, and hence that those institutions send the majority of privacy 

notices. If the Agencies' expectation is that larger institutions will generally not use the Model Form, then 

this reinforces our expectation that most privacy notices will not be in that form.