But well-intentioned regulation designed to strike the proper balance between privacy and efficiency by imposing detailed restriction on the use and transfer of information will most certainly get it wrong. The market itself will do a much better job of balancing the consumer's desire for privacy with the consumer's demand for efficient service than regulators can ever do. The market is already at work. Most financial institutions have published privacy policies. Practices that are unacceptable to consumers have been exposed and stopped.
Consumers have choices and they are making their wishes known.
More than most industries, financial services depends on the trust of its customers. An unhappy customer will not be a customer for long. But customers can be unpredictable. Their unhappiness may be because they believe that information about them has been misused or it may be because information about them is not readily accessible to give them what they want and recognize them as the good customers that they are. The separate, winding roads along which the financial services industry traveled have converged into a single superhighway.