And just as important, you'd be letting the financial industry know that financial privacy is something you care about. They generally come as statement stuffers, which most consumers throw away. You don't realize that there's an action you should take. Privacy worries heated up when Congress decided to allow mergers between banks and insurance companies. Previously, they had been kept apart.
Mergers mean that the companies can freely share information about their customers.
For example, insurance companies can now get lists of savers whose certificates of deposit are maturing, so they can be solicited for annuities or mutual funds. At about the same time that the law on mergers was being changed, a privacy scandal hit the newspapers. Some banks were selling their customers' names, phone numbers and credit-card numbers to telemarketers, even though the banks had said that such information was confidential. Consumer groups proposed a number of restrictions to protect your personal financial privacy. Industry lobbyists beat them back.