With all of the talk and the 573 pages of HMDA data changes, this may have flown under your radar screen.
Under consideration is the National Mortgage Database Project
AKA-FHFA & CFPB want all of the data on a file and more! This is a joint project and will be used to analyze housing issues. Seems innocent enough until you look at the details of who will use this information. Talk about Data breaches, this is the Grand Daddy of them all!
“The FHFA and the CFPB are not going to keep the information they collect to themselves. The information will be provided to academic researchers subject to carefully designed parameters, but data leakage or unauthorized reverse engineering are likely to occur at some point. Moreover, the Federal Register notice identifies a long list of other outside parties that may get access to records in the database. Some of these make sense, but others such as regulated entities and “contract personnel, grantees, volunteers, interns, and others performing or working on a contract, service, grant, cooperative agreement, or project for FHFA,”
The long list that they are referring to is virtually every data field on the application, credit report, appraisal and supporting documents, including the latitude and longitude of the property and your religion, which to my knowledge isn’t on the application or appraisal!
I don’t know about you, but making this information available to “contract personnel” seems insane.
What are your opinions? Do you think this will hinder applicants even further?
No, I do not think it will hurt application from the consumer because they are now empowered as the new victim class. This allows the federal government to justify anything in the name of consumer protection. Most citizens will believe the feds stated intent and keep on putting in their applications.
The good news is they will keep on putting in applications. The bad news is there is no greater deception… no greater darkness than self deception; be it from ignorance or from isolation. When the responsibility as a citizen to redress grievances with our government is politicized there by justifying its dismissal instead of being measured by a impartial media as a principled concern, the fix is in and we just need to buckle up and ride this all they way through the fire until we come out the other side. And I believe we will come out the other side.