About a month ago, a family friend asked me for help with her credit report.
She had an agreement with her bank to pay off a personal loan by making automatic payments for a year. It was an automatic withdrawal from her bank account, so there was no late payment, except for her very last payment to close out the loan.
A month and a half after her last payment should have been finalized, she received a credit alert that she had an overdue payment. She was confused when she saw the alert was for the loan she thought she had paid off.
After calling the bank, she was informed that the last payment in the agreement is not auto-withdrawn. She angrily asked why she never received a notification from her bank to indicate there was an issue and why this policy wasn’t clearly stated over the phone before she signed the agreement. She was told that the terms of the agreement outlined this policy.
Having faithfully repaid her loan for a year, she could not understand why the bank would yank the rug out from under her without any email or note to notify her of the situation or to remind her to make her final payment manually.
She had been repairing her credit to purchase a home only to have her score drop 100 points because of an important policy written into the terms and conditions that many of us would agree to, with the assumption that everything we needed to know was already made clear before signing. What took her years to build was damaged in less than two months.
Critical information about data sharing policies, rights to data and legal recourse, and payment agreements can get buried in terms and conditions that are hard to understand. The average consumer doesn't always have the time to read through legal jargon to figure out if something as small as a service subscription should worry them. It is not uncommon for us to click "I agree" and hope for the best.
What's worse, however, is when the terms don't make it immediately clear what you're agreeing to, such as granting access to your microphone to post videos on social media. It is not immediately apparent that we may have agreed to allow our microphones to be monitored by default, even when we are not using the app.
Of course, fixing that could be as simple as toggling a button, but it’s not always that cut and dry. A simple button switch does not fix my friend's credit report. The bank just took her last payment and told her to figure it out with the credit bureaus. She had to handwrite a forgiveness request letter and send it to the three credit bureaus via certified mail and hope they understood.
Lack of transparency on digital platforms and dark patterns that hide critical information for informed consent make it increasingly difficult for consumers to safely engage with online systems. This becomes a larger issue when these systems are part of high-stakes environments like banking that have the potential to cause damage to our financial futures. As the world of information grows, we see a bigger rift in how groups navigate their digital worlds and how much they know about those worlds. Those with the privilege to understand how these systems work are better off but the communities at the mercy of these systems are often those without the resources to fully comprehend how they’re being affected.
As a Congressional Innovation Scholar, it’s important to me to bring in diverse voices from these communities and experts to address critical policy questions. By doing so, we can minimize the disparate impacts of information and algorithm-driven systems while also creating a new landscape for technical innovation without potentially harmful outcomes. I am committed to helping inform technology policy that addresses digital equity issues, as well as transparency and privacy concerns for historically excluded communities to ensure that underprivileged people have an equitable and livable future.