A new investigative report by Consumer Watchdog explains the sudden reversal by electric worker and corporate lobbyist Scott Wetch to support a controversial energy bill SB 540 (Becker), known as “Pathways,” which cedes control over California environmental laws to...
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 control of their personal information, less than 1 percent...
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 California, there is no easy way to opt out...
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 profits. That’s why, when California voters passed the nation’s...
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 AI is larger than any other industry, exceeding even...
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 program.
They placed the ultimate responsibility for recycling onto...
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 drawn to stop them.
The report, “Unseen Hand: How Automatic...
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 will get unprecedented control over their personal information beginning...
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 prices under control and outlining how to structure the...
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 deposit system crumbles. But a Consumer Watchdog investigation reveals...
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 to limit or deny coverage after a wildfire in...
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 be paying more than $400 billion annually in public...
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 programs in states without a cap on compensation in...
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 country, if the rules can withstand lobbying by the...
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.
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 reports finds that waste haulers are responsible for increasing...
“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 safety critical systems and no known way to disconnect...
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 accessible for regular Californians and restore citizens’ access to...
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 that make up Los Angeles.
Read the report here.
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 wide hacks.
The experts warn that a fleet wide hack...
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 recycling system that leaves consumers fewer options every year...
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 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 independent voice to hold an opaque, mismanaged, and occasionally...
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 how technology companies use home data to draw disturbing inferences...
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 by Jerry Brown’s appointees since the Governor was elected,...
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 wondrous future. Millions of hours previously wasted in traffic,...
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 into thinking they are getting a deal for the...
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 Seattle who was sold for sex more than 150...
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?” On a continuum of “Green” to “Murky” to “Dirty,”...
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 fossil fueland fossil fuel-reliant companies have supported Brown in...
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 months of 2015, when gas prices were consistently $1...
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 company documents to find that the overall economic benefit...
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 analysis of state and federal data. That amounts to...
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 the pump, according to a Consumer Watchdog analysis of...
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 gasoline price spikes. For this report, Consumer Watchdog analyzed...
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 prices spikes. Consumer Watchdog’s president Jamie Court represented the...
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 and will stop at nothing to achieve their ends....
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 in the individual and small group market.
While there is...
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 harm.
Our prior report, Golden Wasteland, documented case after case...
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 that Google+ allows its users to routinely and blatantly...
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 100 percent more for auto insurance than they paid...
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 passage of the federal reform law triggered further outsized...
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 companies, to metal shredders, gas stations, plating companies, and...
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 advertising from fraudulent operators who falsely promise unwary consumers...
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.
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 their wallets to fund this refiner bonanza.
Read the report...
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 familiar values, if not faces. Promises give way to...
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 business practice aimed at steering Internet searchers to its...
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 year1 (not even including occa- sional long-distance drives). They...
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 companies and their refiners produced less diesel, imported less...
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 in spring and summer have equaled the price effects...
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 data show that medical malpractice insurers have historically inflated...
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 controlling costs.
Read the report here.
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 all that corporations steal. In Corporateering, Jamie Court shows...
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 got caught--and killed-in a system aimed at profit. Read...
"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 and injury caused by negligent, incompetent and criminal doctors...
