Accountability

Surveillance Price Gouging

Consumers this holiday season are likely charged different prices for the same product without even knowing it by companies surveilling them,

Data Stalkers

Data brokers know more than google, but Californians aren't opting out. Here's how that could change. Despite laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) empowering consumers to take...

No Opt Out

With thousands of companies selling your data, there is no easy way to exercise privacy right. But help is on the way. Even with strong laws in place in...

How Citizen Enforcement of Proposition 103 has Saved Californians $5.5 Billion – and Why the Insurance Industry Hates It

When California’s insurance regulator operated behind closed doors, the insurance companies always won. Insurance premiums soared, people were denied insurance for no legitimate reason, and insurance companies reaped windfall...

Hallucinating Risk: Here’s How Artificial Intelligence Is Taking Over Wall Street and What Can be Done About It

Major Wall Street investment banks are pouring billions of dollars into AI research, patents, and financing without adequate safeguards, according to an investigation by Consumer Watchdog.Financial services spending on...

At Your Convenience: How California Can Make Refunding Bottle Deposits As Easy As Buying Beverages In The First Place.

After decades of consumer and media criticism of California’s failed bottle deposit return program, Governor Newsom and the California Legislature last year finally passed a substantive reform of the...

Unseen Hand: How Automatic Decision-making Breeds Discrimination and What Can Be Done About It

Consumer Watchdog released a report spotlighting the profiling flaws of algorithms and submitted a letter this week to the state privacy agency outlining how new state regulations can be...

Privacy Dawn: What’s At Stake With Our Data and How It’s Being Protected

Our personal data is sold hundreds of times a day and worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but if regulations for a first-in-the-nation privacy law are drawn correctly, consumers...

Taxing Oil Refiners’ Profits: How To Get Back What Californians Overpay At the Pump

Pointing to windfall profits reported by California oil refiners to their investors, Consumer Watchdog issued a report showing that a windfall profits tax is needed to bring California gas...

Pilot Error : How CalRecycle’s New CRV Refund Pilots are Crashing and Burning

CalRecycle is banking on pilot programs around the state, including “mobile” return pilots, to make it easier for consumers to get California Redemption Value (CRV) refunds as the bottle...

Up In Smoke: How Insurance Companies and the Insurance Commissioner Burn Wildfire Victims

A Consumer Watchdog examination of public filings reveals that insurance companies have inserted provisions into the fine print of their home, condo and renters’ insurance policies that allow them...

Black Gold: The $10 Trillion Dollar Cost of California Oil

The true cost to the public of California’s oil and gas production and combustion is estimated to reach $10 trillion by 2045, a new report released today by Consumer Watchdog finds.  Californians will...

Lift The Cap: How Fairly Compensating Injured Patients Will Save Taxpayer Dollars

Analysis shows California will save up to nearly $18 million by reforming the state’s outdated cap on damages in medical malpractice cases. A study by Consumer Watchdog shows that Medicaid...

Connected Cars and the Threat to Your Privacy

A new report details the privacy problems posed for consumers from connected cars and points to new rules to be developed in California as a potential model across the...

Cash For Trash: Recycling Fraud In California

Recycling fraud is costing Californians hundreds of millions of dollars annually. This report explains the problem and how to fix it. Read the report here.

Waste Haulers: The Square Peg in the Circular Economy

This exposé explores the reasons for the failure of California’s bottle deposit system, which currently has a 57% redemption rate, and puts the blame on the waste hauling industry. The...

Connected Car Report 2020: The Models Most Open To Hacks

“Connected Car Report 2020: The Models Most Open To Hacks," finds all of Car and Driver’s top 10 best-selling cars for 2020 clearly have features that allow wireless connectivity with...

Sea Change in Sacramento: How Electronic Ballot Signatures Empower Voters

The report finds that high signature costs have put the initiative process out of reach for all but the wealthy. It concludes that electronic signatures could make signature gathering...

LA Times Op-Ed Pages Don’t Reflect LA

A Consumer Watchdog review of one year’s worth of the authors published on the op-ed pages of the Los Angeles Times found that it failed to represent the people...

KILL SWITCH: Why Connected Cars Can Be Killing Machines And How To Turn Them Off

Developed with the help of car industry technologists, "Kill Switch" finds all the top 2020 cars have Internet connections to safety critical systems that leave them vulnerable to fleet...

Half a Nickel: How California Consumers Get Ripped Off On Every Bottle Deposit They Pay.

For every nickel bottle deposit that California consumers pay in the checkout line, they only get back 2.65 cents. A three-month investigation by Consumer Watchdog found the reason is a failing state...

Betting Against the House: How California’s Leaders Could Gamble Away Our Energy Future On A Western Power Trading Casino

How a Western Energy Grid integration could create a Wild West casino for California's utilities and how ratepayers could foot the bill. Read the report here.

The Price of Pickel: The LADWP’s Ratepayer Watchdog Comes With A $7 Billion Price Tag

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is the largest, most powerful municipal utility in the country. For its first 110 years, the LADWP had virtually no...

Home Invasion: Google, Amazon Patent Filings Reveal Digital Home Assistant Privacy Problems

A new study reveals that Amazon and Google have filed patent applications for a number of technologies that would dramatically expand surveillance of consumers’ private lives. These patent applications show...

Power Play: How the Governor’s Sister Makes A Million Dollars From SEMPRA While His Appointees Let SEMPRA Bilk Ratepayers For Billions

Consumer Watchdog's Liza Tucker authored a new report on Gov. Jerry Brown and his sister's relationship with Sempra Energy, entitled, Power Play. Sempra shareholders haveprofited wildly from the favorable decisions taken...

Self-Driving Vehicles: The Threat to Consumers

Self-driving vehicles have become a cultural and political phenomenon. To peruse the breathless headlines is, like a ride in Marty McFly’s DeLorean, to experience the sensation of visiting a...

Amazon Slime: Amazon’s New Consumer Deception

Two Consumer Watchdog reports show that Amazon is deceiving its customers by putting fake crossed-out prices next to its products.  It’s a deceptive marketing ploy meant to trick consumers...

How Google’s Backing of Backpage Protects Child Sex Trafficking

Details of Backpage’s victims have filled multiple lawsuits, legal actions and government investigations: A 13-year-old girl in Miami whose pimp tattooed his name on her eyelids; a 15-year-old in...

How Green Is Jerry Brown?

This review fact-checks the perception of Jerry Brown as an environmentalist against his actions since taking office as Governor in 2011 to answer the question: “How Green Is Brown?”...

Brown’s Dirty Hands

Governor Jerry Brown paints himself a foe of climate change. But an exhaustive review of company donations, publicly released emails and documents at http://www.PUCPapers.org, and media reports show that...

Against The Tide: How Missing Tankers Pumped Up Gas Prices and Refiner Profits

Consumer Watchdog analyzed data from the shipping market and state sources to study the impact of gasoline imports and exports on gas prices in California during the first nine...

Keystone XL: Oil Industry Cash Machine

Consumer Watchdog investigated the impact of the Keystone XL Pipeline on gasoline prices and consumers. is analysis by Judy Dugan and Tim Hamilton utilized industry data, public records and...

Oil Slicked: How Refiners Spend Millions to Protect Billions in Record Profits.

Californians have paid $7.5 billion more than they should have for their gasoline since California’s record gasoline price spike began in February of 2015, according to a Consumer Watchdog...

Golden State Gouge: The Summer of Record Refining Profits

In the six months since California’s record gasoline price spike began in February, Californians have paid $4.8 billion more than the rest of the country for regular gasoline at...

Refining Profits: How Californians Get Fleeced at the Pump

This analysis, “Refining Profits,” looks at how oil refiners in California fared over the last decade in their refining operaDons and compared the companies’ refining profits during periods of...

Price Spiked: How Oil Refiners Gouge Californians on their Gasoline and What it Costs

Californians have perennially experienced steep gasoline price spikes since 1999 when California’s Attorney General formed a Gasoline Pricing Taskforce that identified market consolidation and limited inventories as causes of...

Pump Jacking California’s Climate Protection: The Threat Of Oil Industry Influence & Market Manipulation

Internal documents obtained from the oil industry’s lobbying arm, the Western States Petroleum Association, show that the companies have made stopping California’s landmark climate change laws their top priority...

Projected Savings From Prop 45

Proposition 45 will require health insurance companies to open their books and publicly justify their rates under penalty of perjury before they are permitted to change rates for consumers...

Inside Job: How Boeing Fixers Captured Regulators And Derailed A Nuclear And Chemical Cleanup in LA’s Backyard

The California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) has been a historically troubled agency, far too often failing to effectively fulfill its mission of protecting the public from toxic...

Google Glass Raises Privacy And Safety Concerns

Google Glass raises privacy and safety concerns, said Consumer Watchdog in a report released Monday.

Google+: A Playground for Online Predators

From March to September 2013, an investigation was undertaken to detail the significant privacy issues Google+ users may encounter when using the service. The evidence that follows will demonstrate...

What Works: A Review of Auto Insurance Rate Regulation in America and How Best Practices Save Billions of Dollars

Over the past quarter century, auto insurance expenditures in America have risen by more than 40 percent. Consumers in some states are paying 80 percent, 90 percent, and even...

Health Reform and Insurance Regulation: Can’t Have One Without the Other

Health insurance premiums are increasing at a rate faster than medical inflation, especially in the volatile individual and small group markets, and worker incomes have not kept pace. The...

Golden Wasteland: Regulating Toxics or Toxic Regulation

California produces more than four billion pounds of hazardous waste every year. That’s enough to fill 727 Olympic-sized pools. At least one hundred thousand businesses, from aerospace, computer, and chemical...

Liars and Loans: How Deceptive Advertisers Use Google

Google has been a prominent beneficiary of the national home loan and foreclosure crisis of the past two years. The giant search engine company has profited by accepting deceptive...

Lost in the Cloud: Google and the U.S. Government

An ambitious quest for influence with the U.S. government is starting to pay off for tech giant Google, a Consumer Watchdog investigation has found.  Read the report here.

Valero Energy and Its California Profit Pipeline

A review of profit, shareholder and government reports from the last decade show that Valero reaped extraordinary profits from its refining operations in the Golden State, while drivers emptied...

The Progressive’s Guide to Raising Hell: How to Win Grassroots Campaigns, Pass Ballot Box Laws, and Get the Change We Voted For

Change is no simple matter in American politics-a fact that Americans have recently learned well. Elections rarely produce the change they promise. After the vote, power vacuums fill with...

Traffic Report: How Google Is Squeezing Out Competitors and Muscling Into New Markets

Google has been muscling into new web markets and greatly expanding its dominance of other web commerce sectors since 2007, when the web search giant adopted a controversial new...

Cleaner & Cheaper:A Handbook of Transportation and Related Energy Choices 2009 and Beyond

This handbook offers solutions for the most visible and perva- sive sector of the current oil/environmental crisis: transportation by automobile. Americans travel more than 3.5 trillion vehicle miles per...

The Causes And Effects Of The Record Breaking Price Of Diesel

Diesel fuel is the engine of American commerce and public life. Oil companies, by manipulat- ing supply, put sugar in the tank of a whole economy this spring. The...

The Changing Relationship Between the Price of Crude Oil and the Price At the Pump

Crude oil prices, gasoline prices, and consumer protection Read the report here.

The “Katrina Syndrome”: What Oil Companies Learned From a Disaster

The oil industry is reporting second-quarter profits this week, and has signaled that refining profits will again be at record or near-record levels. Two consecutive years of soaring prices...

False Accounting: How Medical Malpractice Insurance Companies Inflate Losses to Justify Sudden Surges in Rates and Tort Reform

In this study, the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR)1 reviews the loss projections of medical malpractice insurance companies, beginning with the “insurance crisis” of the mid-1980s. The...

How Insurance Reform Lowered Doctors’ Medical Malpractice Rates in California

This report shows how California’s landmark Proposition 103 has lowered Medical Malpractice rates for doctors across the state. It also shows how caps on damages have not succeeded in...

Corporateering: How Corporate Power Steals Your Personal Freedom… And What You Can Do About It

Enron. Tyco. Arthur Andersen. These companies have turned "corporate" into a four-letter word as headline after headline reveals shocking stories of executives stealing money from investors. But money isn't...

Hoax

How deregulation let the energy industry steal billions from Californians. Read the report here.

Making a Killing: HMOs and the Threat to Your Health

If a Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) is your family's medical provider, just hope you never face a medical crisis. This compelling book tells story after story of people who...

Consumer Imposters: The Big Business Deception Behind Props 200, 201, & 202

Who is really behind propositions 200, 201, and 202? Read the report here.

Silent Violence, Silent Death: The Hidden Epidemic of Medical Malpractice

"Medical care may be hazardous to your health." That frightening warning is the principal conclusion of numerous studies. Independent scientific research has sketched out the frightening dimensions of death...

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