If we're going to go through all this trouble to mail out all this paper to people, it would have been nice if it had been in aid of real privacy protection. Banks are affected most Representatives of banks, which are most-widely affected by the privacy notice requirement, say they are complying with the law. If the notices seem cumbersome or full of jargon, it is because the new regulations have forced them to go into more detail about their privacy policies than in the past, they contend. Our current statement, which is about five or six pages long, really doesn't say anything different than what it did before. But the law also set up new rules to limit the sharing of information about consumers.
Many financial institutions collect information about their customers as a regular part of business.
Banks, for example, learn about their customers' income, view reports from credit bureaus and find out about credit-card spending and repayment patterns. Some share such information with third parties. Data must be described The new law requires each institution to tell customers in the annual privacy notice about the kinds of information it collects and the kinds of businesses that may be given that information. The privacy notice offers customers the chance to prohibit the bank from sharing non-public information about them. But there are exceptions, such as information that is needed to protect against fraud or to allow normal business operations like automated teller machine transactions through unaffiliated banks.