Consumer Watchdog (USA)
Encyclopedia
Consumer Watchdog is a non-profit, progressive organization which advocates for taxpayer and consumer
interests, with a focus on insurance, health care, political reform, privacy and energy.
The consumer organization was founded in 1985 by California Proposition 103
author Harvey Rosenfield
and is headquartered in Santa Monica
, California
. Its chief officers include President Jamie Court
and Executive Director Douglas Heller. Other notable staff include consumer advocate John Simpson
.
The group states on its website: "Big Business has an endless amount of money and thousands of lobbyists working every day to protect and increase their profits - no matter who it hurts. We get in their way and work to protect and improve the lives of American consumers and taxpayers."
on a number of issues including campaign finance reform and nuclear power proliferation, Rosenfield founded Consumer Watchdog in 1985.
Later, Rosenfield and Nader campaigned against Prop 51, an insuraunace industry backed initiative on the California
ballot in 1986 that limited damage claims on lawsuits.
Though Proposition 51 passed, Rosenfield continued to work for insurance
rate reductions at his newly formed public interest group. Rosenfield believed insurance regulation was the only solution to rising insurance rates in California. In response, Rosenfield drafted new insurance reform legislation, which insurance industry lobbyists defeated in the state capital.
Voter Revolt operated on a $2.9 million dollar budget, a fraction of the insurance industry's $63 million dollar lobbying and advertising effort. The insurance industry, fearing they would not be able to defeat Proposition 103, launched three competing initiative measures in an attempt to confuse voters.
To bring attention to his cause, Harvey Rosenfield used grassroots
publicity stunts like having guards accompany Rosenfield while he delivered the signatures that got Proposition 103 on the ballot. As well, the group attempted to deliver truckloads of cow manure to the headquarters of Farmers Insurance of Los Angeles.
These stunts, many 18-hour days, canvassers knocking on 1 million doors, and the high profile endorsement of Ralph Nader, helped Voter Revolt pass the initiative in November 1988. The win was seen as a huge blow to the insurance industry. Since then, Consumer Watchdog has defended Proposition 103 from insurance industry challenges and ensured the proposition's implementation. In 2008, the Consumer Federation for America estimated that Proposition 103 had saved consumers over $62 billion dollars since 1988.
to repeal a provision of Proposition 103 that prohibits insurance companies from considering a driver's history of prior insurance coverage when determining the price or availability of automobile insurance. Mercury spent $16 million in its effort, funding a group called Californians for Fair Automobile Insurance Rates. Consumer Watchdog argued that the measure would have allowed Mercury and other companies to impose surcharges of as much as $1,000 on drivers who have not had continuous coverage. To raise awareness of the fact that an insurance company was trying to hide its sponsorship of Proposition 17, Consumer Watchdog sent a man in a chicken suit to legislative hearings on the measure. The group was outspent 12-to-1, but the measure was narrowly defeated on June 8, 2010.
In 1998, Consumer Watchdog advocated for legislation, ultimately signed into law by California Governor Gray Davis
, to extend broad need rights to HMO patients. To bring attention to the issue, the group dumped a truck load of pinto beans at an HMO industry conference to emphasize Consumer Watchdog's opposition to HMO "bean counters" overriding doctors' decisions. Most of the legislative package later passed with the help of the California Nurses Association in November 1998.
As a result, California has the strongest HMO patient protection laws in America. Many of the provisions of California's bill were included in the national U.S. Patients' Bill of Rights act, which passed Congress in 2001.
to buy cheaper drugs. The group wanted to show how Americans pay about 60 percent more for prescription drugs than people in other countries.
The Rx Express train trips generated more than three hundred television appearances, with a Nielsen audience of sixty-five million, sixty newspaper articles, and one hundred radio interviews.
The provision of prescription drug benefits to seniors became a central issue in the election and ultimately translated to an expansion of Medicare.
In 2009, Consumer Watchdog launched with Mayor Antonio Villaraigos the LARx Prescriptions Savings Card Program, a City-wide card program that provides discounts on all pharmaceutical medications and is open to all interested individuals with no age, income or other eligibility restrictions. Consumer Watchdog developed the program with the City of Los Angeles.
memo to the media, which displayed distasteful remarks about why newborn mothers should be discharged in that amount of time. A number of news agencies picked up on the story, which brought the issue to the spotlight and eventually lead to congressional hearings. Congress later passed a law requiring that newborns and their mothers not be discharged from the hospital any sooner than forty-eight hours without their consent.
The group also runs Oil Watchdog, “a blog and resource library about the profiteering, power, and unscrupulous practices of the oil industry.”
Leading up to the 2010 California elections, Oil Watchdog wrote a report exposing the profit motive of Valero when it donated $5 million into a ballot initiative that aimed at stopping California's green energy industries in their tracks. The group created a controversial video to expose the practices of Koch industries, which it displayed in Times Square.
's ties to special interests. The group also targeted four Schwarzenegger-backed proposition on the ballot in a special election in 2005. Specifically, Proposition 74, which would have lengthened the time it takes for teachers to get tenure, Proposition 75, which would have limited public employee unions' political spending, Proposition 76, which would have limited California's spending and Proposition 77, which would have removed lawmakers ability to redistrict the state. Consumer Watchdog's grassroots efforts lead to the defeat of the propositions and changed Schwarzenegger's governorship.
The group also helped expose former Senate majority leader Bill Frist
’s conflicts of interest. Frist, a doctor whose family controlled one of the nation’s largest hospital chains, HCA, was then backing a Senate bill to limit legal accountability for doctors and hospitals when they commit medical malpractice
.
The group publicly demanded that Frist sell at least $25 million of stock he held in the company. At the time, HCA was one of America’s largest hospital companies and owner of HCI, the nation’s fifth biggest medical malpractice insurer.
Though the group’s initial request went ignored by Frist, the Senate ethics committee and the mainstream media, it did create a record, which later became significant in the demise of the politicians political career.
As the Independent Citizen’s Oversight Committee hashed out the intellectual property rules of Proposition 71, a successful 2004 ballot initiative that created $3 billion in general obligation bonds to fund stem cell research, Consumer Watchdog pushed to have language put in the regulations that ensure any cures that result from the research be made available to underserved populations and that the state recoup a portion of the taxpayers' investment.
Consumer Watchdog, along with the Public Patent Foundation, also challenged patents held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) on the grounds that the patents stymied research.
The groups’ efforts resulted in the United States Patent and Trademark Office revoking two of WARF's patents, though they were later modified and re-instated. Third was rejected, but that decision is being appealed by WARF. After the challenge was filed, WARF substantially eased licensing requirements, making stem cells more readily available for researchers.
legislation in 2002. The legislation, which required consumers to opt in before financial services companies shared their personal information with other companies, had public support, but lawmakers wouldn’t move it forward. The group wanted to expose how much personal information was for sale on the Internet for a relatively cheap price. To prove their point, the group published the partial social security numbers legislators opposed to financial privacy on his website. As a result of the group’s tactics, and the signature gathering help of e-loan's Chris Larsen, Governor Davis signed the "country's toughest financial privacy legislation."
accountable for tracking consumers online without explicit permission and for exhibiting its monopolistic power in dangerous ways."
Consumer Watchdog has also been influential in "Do Not Track Me" revolution. The consumer group was recognized by David Vladeck
, the consumer protection chief at the Federal Trade Commission, during an online privacy conference on December 1, 2010 in Washington DC. That morning Vladeck announced that the FTC would recommend that every browser come equipped with a "do not track me" function that prevents companies from collecting data against the user's will.
Consumer brought attention to many of Google privacy issues with a series of online videos in 2008. The first explained how new browser functions in Chrome stealthily transmitted information to the company for tracking purposes. The second explained how Google was reading emails in its Gmail system to market consumers based on contents.
In the face of the exposures, Google agreed to fix privacy problems identified by the videos in its Chrome browser that it claimed were inadvertent. Moreover the company made some larger privacy changes answering criticisms in Consumer Watchdog videos. In November 2009 Google launched a dashboard offering consumers better knowledge of and control over their information on Google¹s various services. In January 2010 the company began offering SSL encryption using the HTTPS protocol as the default mode for its Gmail service. In May the company began offering an encrypted SSL connection for its search engine as an option. For maximum consumer protection, SSL should be the default mode for search and should be offered on other Google service as well. Recently, Google entered into a landmark overhaul of its privacy polices in a settlement with the FTC that addressed or touched upon many of the privacy issues Consumer Watchdog has raised.
In 2010, to bring attention to Google's privacy issues, Consumer Watchdog checked networks in California Representative Jane Harman's
home to see if her unencrypted Wi-Fi
network might have been tapped when the company captured images for the Google Streetview service of Google Maps
.
In the summer of 2010, the organization launched a video in Times Square
portrayed Google chief executive Eric Schmidt as an exploitative ice cream salesman. The cartoon led to criticism of Consumer Watchdog by some in the technology industry media. In 2011, the group created another video of Schmidt in an effort to get him to testify in front of Congress about Google’s privacy issues.
In 2011, Consumer Watchdog issued a report, Lost in the Cloud: Google and the US Government, filled with details obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and interviews. The report claimed that Google has "inappropriately benefited" from close ties to the government. It also alleged that Google's influence with the Obama Administration, DHS, FCC, NASA, U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, Department of Defense, and NSA has helped shield Google and caused "insufficient federal action on Google’s 'Wi-Spy' debacle."
The report also asked Congress to look into "Air Google," asking how NASA'S Moffett Airfield has been "turned into a taxpayer-subsidized private airport for Google executives."
Because of Consumer Watchdog's work, Google allegedly tried to influence the Rose Foundation to halt funding for Inside Google.
Consumer
Consumer is a broad label for any individuals or households that use goods generated within the economy. The concept of a consumer occurs in different contexts, so that the usage and significance of the term may vary.-Economics and marketing:...
interests, with a focus on insurance, health care, political reform, privacy and energy.
The consumer organization was founded in 1985 by California Proposition 103
California Department of Insurance
The California Department of Insurance , established in 1868, is the agency charged with overseeing the regulation of insurance regulations, enforcing statutes mandating consumer protections, educating consumers, and fostering the stability of insurance markets in the state of California...
author Harvey Rosenfield
Harvey Rosenfield
Harvey Rosenfield is an American lawyer, author and consumer advocate. In 1985, he founded Consumer Watchdog, a nationally recognized, nonpartisan nonprofit public interest group. He now serves as the group's counsel....
and is headquartered in Santa Monica
Santa Monica, California
Santa Monica is a beachfront city in western Los Angeles County, California, US. Situated on Santa Monica Bay, it is surrounded on three sides by the city of Los Angeles — Pacific Palisades on the northwest, Brentwood on the north, West Los Angeles on the northeast, Mar Vista on the east, and...
, California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
. Its chief officers include President Jamie Court
Jamie Court
Jamie Court is an American author, political activist, lobbyist and consumer advocate. He serves as president of Consumer Watchdog, a nationally recognized, nonpartisan, nonprofit public interest group....
and Executive Director Douglas Heller. Other notable staff include consumer advocate John Simpson
John Simpson (journalist/consumer advocate)
John M. Simpson is an American consumer rights advocate and former journalist. Since 2005, he has worked for Consumer Watchdog, a nonpartisan nonprofit public interest group, as the lead researcher on Inside Google, the group's effort to educate the public about Google's dominance over the...
.
The group states on its website: "Big Business has an endless amount of money and thousands of lobbyists working every day to protect and increase their profits - no matter who it hurts. We get in their way and work to protect and improve the lives of American consumers and taxpayers."
Early History
After lobbying with consumer advocate Ralph NaderRalph Nader
Ralph Nader is an American political activist, as well as an author, lecturer, and attorney. Areas of particular concern to Nader include consumer protection, humanitarianism, environmentalism, and democratic government....
on a number of issues including campaign finance reform and nuclear power proliferation, Rosenfield founded Consumer Watchdog in 1985.
Later, Rosenfield and Nader campaigned against Prop 51, an insuraunace industry backed initiative on the California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
ballot in 1986 that limited damage claims on lawsuits.
Though Proposition 51 passed, Rosenfield continued to work for insurance
Insurance
In law and economics, insurance is a form of risk management primarily used to hedge against the risk of a contingent, uncertain loss. Insurance is defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for payment. An insurer is a company selling the...
rate reductions at his newly formed public interest group. Rosenfield believed insurance regulation was the only solution to rising insurance rates in California. In response, Rosenfield drafted new insurance reform legislation, which insurance industry lobbyists defeated in the state capital.
Proposition 103
In 1987, Rosenfield began to write a ballot box proposal to regulate California property and casualty insurance companies and formed a campaign to sponsor it called Voter Revolt. The proposal turned into insurance reform Proposition 103 and promised voters a minimum 20% rollback in rates for property, auto and other kinds of insurance. The measure required auto insurers to base auto insurance premiums primarily on a policyholder's driving safety record, annual mileage driven and years driving experience. Proposition 103 also made the California Insurance Commissioner an elected official, subjected insurers to California's antitrust laws, civil rights laws and unfair business competition law.Voter Revolt operated on a $2.9 million dollar budget, a fraction of the insurance industry's $63 million dollar lobbying and advertising effort. The insurance industry, fearing they would not be able to defeat Proposition 103, launched three competing initiative measures in an attempt to confuse voters.
To bring attention to his cause, Harvey Rosenfield used grassroots
Grassroots
A grassroots movement is one driven by the politics of a community. The term implies that the creation of the movement and the group supporting it are natural and spontaneous, highlighting the differences between this and a movement that is orchestrated by traditional power structures...
publicity stunts like having guards accompany Rosenfield while he delivered the signatures that got Proposition 103 on the ballot. As well, the group attempted to deliver truckloads of cow manure to the headquarters of Farmers Insurance of Los Angeles.
These stunts, many 18-hour days, canvassers knocking on 1 million doors, and the high profile endorsement of Ralph Nader, helped Voter Revolt pass the initiative in November 1988. The win was seen as a huge blow to the insurance industry. Since then, Consumer Watchdog has defended Proposition 103 from insurance industry challenges and ensured the proposition's implementation. In 2008, the Consumer Federation for America estimated that Proposition 103 had saved consumers over $62 billion dollars since 1988.
Proposition 17
During 2010, Consumer Watchdog fought Proposition 17, a ballot measure sponsored by Mercury Insurance GroupMercury Insurance Group
Mercury Insurance Group is an American automobile and property insurance company founded by George Joseph in 1961. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles, CA.-History:...
to repeal a provision of Proposition 103 that prohibits insurance companies from considering a driver's history of prior insurance coverage when determining the price or availability of automobile insurance. Mercury spent $16 million in its effort, funding a group called Californians for Fair Automobile Insurance Rates. Consumer Watchdog argued that the measure would have allowed Mercury and other companies to impose surcharges of as much as $1,000 on drivers who have not had continuous coverage. To raise awareness of the fact that an insurance company was trying to hide its sponsorship of Proposition 17, Consumer Watchdog sent a man in a chicken suit to legislative hearings on the measure. The group was outspent 12-to-1, but the measure was narrowly defeated on June 8, 2010.
HMO patients' rights
In 1994, during the Clinton healthcare debate, Consumer Watchdog created Californians for Quality Care and appointed Jamie Court to spearhead the effort. In 1996, Consumer Watchdog worked to have the nation's first patients' bill of rights proposition placed on the California ballot. However, Proposition 216 failed to pass, garnering only 38.7% of the vote.In 1998, Consumer Watchdog advocated for legislation, ultimately signed into law by California Governor Gray Davis
Gray Davis
Joseph Graham "Gray" Davis, Jr. is an American Democratic politician who served as California's 37th Governor from 1999 until being recalled in 2003...
, to extend broad need rights to HMO patients. To bring attention to the issue, the group dumped a truck load of pinto beans at an HMO industry conference to emphasize Consumer Watchdog's opposition to HMO "bean counters" overriding doctors' decisions. Most of the legislative package later passed with the help of the California Nurses Association in November 1998.
As a result, California has the strongest HMO patient protection laws in America. Many of the provisions of California's bill were included in the national U.S. Patients' Bill of Rights act, which passed Congress in 2001.
Prescription Drug Costs
During the 2004 election, Consumer Watchdog chartered two private trains—dubbed the Rx Express—to take seniors to CanadaCanada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
to buy cheaper drugs. The group wanted to show how Americans pay about 60 percent more for prescription drugs than people in other countries.
The Rx Express train trips generated more than three hundred television appearances, with a Nielsen audience of sixty-five million, sixty newspaper articles, and one hundred radio interviews.
The provision of prescription drug benefits to seniors became a central issue in the election and ultimately translated to an expansion of Medicare.
In 2009, Consumer Watchdog launched with Mayor Antonio Villaraigos the LARx Prescriptions Savings Card Program, a City-wide card program that provides discounts on all pharmaceutical medications and is open to all interested individuals with no age, income or other eligibility restrictions. Consumer Watchdog developed the program with the City of Los Angeles.
HMO Care for New Mothers
Consumer Watchdog helped influence Congress to ban what the group called “drive-through deliveries,” hospitals forcing mothers to be discharged after 8 hours. The group exposed a KaiserKaiser
Kaiser is the German title meaning "Emperor", with Kaiserin being the female equivalent, "Empress". Like the Russian Czar it is directly derived from the Latin Emperors' title of Caesar, which in turn is derived from the personal name of a branch of the gens Julia, to which Gaius Julius Caesar,...
memo to the media, which displayed distasteful remarks about why newborn mothers should be discharged in that amount of time. A number of news agencies picked up on the story, which brought the issue to the spotlight and eventually lead to congressional hearings. Congress later passed a law requiring that newborns and their mothers not be discharged from the hospital any sooner than forty-eight hours without their consent.
Energy Regulation
In 1998, the group co-sponsored Proposition 9, a ballot initiative to block aspects of the utility deregulation laws passed by California lawmakers in 1996. Proposition 9 failed due to the $40 million dollar opposition campaign funded largely by California's three major private utilities – Pacific Gas &Electric, Edison International and Sempra Energy. During the 2000-2001 California Electricity Crisis, Consumer Watchdog became the lead critic of a proposed legislative bailout of the three major utilities. The legislature did not enact the proposed bailout.The group also runs Oil Watchdog, “a blog and resource library about the profiteering, power, and unscrupulous practices of the oil industry.”
Leading up to the 2010 California elections, Oil Watchdog wrote a report exposing the profit motive of Valero when it donated $5 million into a ballot initiative that aimed at stopping California's green energy industries in their tracks. The group created a controversial video to expose the practices of Koch industries, which it displayed in Times Square.
Political Reform
In 2003, Consumer Watchdog launched Arnold Watch to expose Governor Arnold SchwarzeneggerArnold Schwarzenegger
Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger is an Austrian-American former professional bodybuilder, actor, businessman, investor, and politician. Schwarzenegger served as the 38th Governor of California from 2003 until 2011....
's ties to special interests. The group also targeted four Schwarzenegger-backed proposition on the ballot in a special election in 2005. Specifically, Proposition 74, which would have lengthened the time it takes for teachers to get tenure, Proposition 75, which would have limited public employee unions' political spending, Proposition 76, which would have limited California's spending and Proposition 77, which would have removed lawmakers ability to redistrict the state. Consumer Watchdog's grassroots efforts lead to the defeat of the propositions and changed Schwarzenegger's governorship.
The group also helped expose former Senate majority leader Bill Frist
Bill Frist
William Harrison "Bill" Frist, Sr. is an American physician, businessman, and politician. He began his career as an heir and major stockholder to the for-profit hospital chain of Hospital Corporation of America. Frist later served two terms as a Republican United States Senator representing...
’s conflicts of interest. Frist, a doctor whose family controlled one of the nation’s largest hospital chains, HCA, was then backing a Senate bill to limit legal accountability for doctors and hospitals when they commit medical malpractice
Medical malpractice
Medical malpractice is professional negligence by act or omission by a health care provider in which the treatment provided falls below the accepted standard of practice in the medical community and causes injury or death to the patient, with most cases involving medical error. Standards and...
.
The group publicly demanded that Frist sell at least $25 million of stock he held in the company. At the time, HCA was one of America’s largest hospital companies and owner of HCI, the nation’s fifth biggest medical malpractice insurer.
Though the group’s initial request went ignored by Frist, the Senate ethics committee and the mainstream media, it did create a record, which later became significant in the demise of the politicians political career.
Stem Cell Oversight
Consumer Watchdog created Stem Cell Oversight and Accountability Project to ensure that citizens of California reaped the benefits of state funded stem cell research.As the Independent Citizen’s Oversight Committee hashed out the intellectual property rules of Proposition 71, a successful 2004 ballot initiative that created $3 billion in general obligation bonds to fund stem cell research, Consumer Watchdog pushed to have language put in the regulations that ensure any cures that result from the research be made available to underserved populations and that the state recoup a portion of the taxpayers' investment.
Consumer Watchdog, along with the Public Patent Foundation, also challenged patents held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) on the grounds that the patents stymied research.
The groups’ efforts resulted in the United States Patent and Trademark Office revoking two of WARF's patents, though they were later modified and re-instated. Third was rejected, but that decision is being appealed by WARF. After the challenge was filed, WARF substantially eased licensing requirements, making stem cells more readily available for researchers.
Financial Privacy
Consumer Watchdog fought for financial privacyFinancial privacy
Financial Privacy is a blanket term for a multitude of privacy issues:*Financial Institutions ensuring that their customers information remains private to those outside the institution. Issues include the Patriot Act, and other debates of privacy vs...
legislation in 2002. The legislation, which required consumers to opt in before financial services companies shared their personal information with other companies, had public support, but lawmakers wouldn’t move it forward. The group wanted to expose how much personal information was for sale on the Internet for a relatively cheap price. To prove their point, the group published the partial social security numbers legislators opposed to financial privacy on his website. As a result of the group’s tactics, and the signature gathering help of e-loan's Chris Larsen, Governor Davis signed the "country's toughest financial privacy legislation."
Google & Internet Privacy
Funded by the Rose Foundation, Consumer Watchdog’s Inside Google's is an initiative to educate the general public "about the need for greater online privacy, and to hold GoogleGoogle
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
accountable for tracking consumers online without explicit permission and for exhibiting its monopolistic power in dangerous ways."
Consumer Watchdog has also been influential in "Do Not Track Me" revolution. The consumer group was recognized by David Vladeck
David Vladeck
David C. Vladeck is the current Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection of the Federal Trade Commission, an independent agency of the United States government...
, the consumer protection chief at the Federal Trade Commission, during an online privacy conference on December 1, 2010 in Washington DC. That morning Vladeck announced that the FTC would recommend that every browser come equipped with a "do not track me" function that prevents companies from collecting data against the user's will.
Consumer brought attention to many of Google privacy issues with a series of online videos in 2008. The first explained how new browser functions in Chrome stealthily transmitted information to the company for tracking purposes. The second explained how Google was reading emails in its Gmail system to market consumers based on contents.
In the face of the exposures, Google agreed to fix privacy problems identified by the videos in its Chrome browser that it claimed were inadvertent. Moreover the company made some larger privacy changes answering criticisms in Consumer Watchdog videos. In November 2009 Google launched a dashboard offering consumers better knowledge of and control over their information on Google¹s various services. In January 2010 the company began offering SSL encryption using the HTTPS protocol as the default mode for its Gmail service. In May the company began offering an encrypted SSL connection for its search engine as an option. For maximum consumer protection, SSL should be the default mode for search and should be offered on other Google service as well. Recently, Google entered into a landmark overhaul of its privacy polices in a settlement with the FTC that addressed or touched upon many of the privacy issues Consumer Watchdog has raised.
In 2010, to bring attention to Google's privacy issues, Consumer Watchdog checked networks in California Representative Jane Harman's
Jane Harman
Jane Margaret Lakes Harman is the former U.S. Representative for , serving from 1993 to 1999, and from 2001 to 2011. She is a member of the Democratic Party....
home to see if her unencrypted Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi or Wifi, is a mechanism for wirelessly connecting electronic devices. A device enabled with Wi-Fi, such as a personal computer, video game console, smartphone, or digital audio player, can connect to the Internet via a wireless network access point. An access point has a range of about 20...
network might have been tapped when the company captured images for the Google Streetview service of Google Maps
Google Maps
Google Maps is a web mapping service application and technology provided by Google, free , that powers many map-based services, including the Google Maps website, Google Ride Finder, Google Transit, and maps embedded on third-party websites via the Google Maps API...
.
In the summer of 2010, the organization launched a video in Times Square
Times Square
Times Square is a major commercial intersection in the borough of Manhattan in New York City, at the junction of Broadway and Seventh Avenue and stretching from West 42nd to West 47th Streets...
portrayed Google chief executive Eric Schmidt as an exploitative ice cream salesman. The cartoon led to criticism of Consumer Watchdog by some in the technology industry media. In 2011, the group created another video of Schmidt in an effort to get him to testify in front of Congress about Google’s privacy issues.
In 2011, Consumer Watchdog issued a report, Lost in the Cloud: Google and the US Government, filled with details obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and interviews. The report claimed that Google has "inappropriately benefited" from close ties to the government. It also alleged that Google's influence with the Obama Administration, DHS, FCC, NASA, U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, Department of Defense, and NSA has helped shield Google and caused "insufficient federal action on Google’s 'Wi-Spy' debacle."
The report also asked Congress to look into "Air Google," asking how NASA'S Moffett Airfield has been "turned into a taxpayer-subsidized private airport for Google executives."
Because of Consumer Watchdog's work, Google allegedly tried to influence the Rose Foundation to halt funding for Inside Google.
Legal Cases
- MacKay v. 21st Century
- Consumer Watchdog v. Dept. of Managed Health Care
- Imburgia, Mecca and Greiner v. DirecTVDirecTVDirecTV is an American direct broadcast satellite service provider and broadcaster based in El Segundo, California. Its satellite service, launched on June 17, 1994, transmits digital satellite television and audio to households in the United States, Latin America, and the Anglophone Caribbean. ...
- Challenging Mercury Insurance on Illegal Broker Fees (CA Dept. of Insurance Noncompliance Action)
- (Faigman v. AT&T Mobility LLC)
- Feller & Freed v. Blue Cross of California
- Fogel v. Farmers Group, Inc