I attended Consumer Assembly, which is the Consumer Federation of America annual conference. Their program gives the agenda of what happened over March 14-15.
Elizabeth Warren, friend of the Consumer Movement, was opening speaker and encouraging of all the work we did. I went to sessions on mobile privacy and warning labels and attended the general sessions, which included talks on the Universal Service Fund. A lot of the attendees worked as telecommunications advocates, which I thought was strange because I do so much Internet advocacy myself but rarely do I meet in my circles anyone who feels strongly about access to landline phones and modest lowering of cell phone prices. The people at this conference were convinced that lowering cell phone prices just a bit would make a big difference in who could afford a cell phone, and they also advocated for the rights of people in rural areas to access to the communications network. I simply had not considered these issues before and if I could, I would like to learn more about this and take the information to the groups I regularly meet.
The mobile privacy talk found consensus even though the panelists had widely varying backgrounds and interests. Everyone was in agreement that there should be phone standardization, explanations for the users as to what they were disclosing through a given app, and some kind of interface for reviewing the history of a phone’s data sharing. The commercial sector wanted this because they get nothing out of sleazing data away from consumers who do not want to share it, and feel that many people would choose to share information anyway. Even though I think the consumer is in a difficult position of wanting to use apps which share a lot of data and not having options to use an app without sharing data, I think it would be a victory if only people could have the choice to learn what data they are sharing, and I would like to see the industry trend in that direction.
The warning label talk was great. No one mentioned the term “user experience” in this talk, so it seemed to me that they were from a different cultural tradition because everything about what they were saying would be what I would call user experience problems. Their complaints were that products which have safety problems should not disclaim the risk with only a warning label, because people often misunderstand the warning labels and the products should be safer at the manufacturer’s cost. David R. Pittle formerly of Consumer Reports was here and I got to meet him.
Stephen Brobeck as president of the Consumer Federation of America was there. I hardly got to speak with him but our paths must cross again. He is editor of the Encyclopedia of the Consumer Movement and I must be one of the biggest fans of that work. He is even writing some kind of updated addition, so he must be doing this from spiritual compulsion because there simply cannot be enough people to care about this level of documentation to make something like this commercially viable. The original book from 1997 is a critical international history and explanation of basics of the Consumer Movement, and this book probably is the best link for a beginner to come to understand deeper concepts.
I met Robert Weissman from Public Citizen, and he seems like a powerhouse. I heard him talk and spoke to him briefly and wanted to know more about him. I met other people from other organizations, including CR’s board member from US-PIRG, Ed Mierzwinski; staff of UL, a librarian from the Kansas State University Library’s consumer archives, and have other business cards of all kinds of people with fascinating product safety stories. I feel like I have a lot to learn.