Consumer Protection by Computer

By Rita Kaiser, Reference Services Librarian

Consumer Protection Law is defined in Black’s Law Dictionary as, “A state or federal statute designed to protect consumers against unfair trade and credit practices involving consumer goods, as well as to protect consumers against faulty and dangerous goods.” Washington State’s Consumer Protection Act is codified at RCW 19.86.010 et seq. The Office of the Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division enforces consumer protection statutes by investigating and bringing legal actions to stop fraudulent and deceptive practices, and recovering refunds, costs and penalties.

Therefore, if you need to find information on consumer protection, the best place to start is at the Attorney General’s website. The King County Law Library’s (www.kcll.org) Research Links page has a section titled Self Help in our Reference links which includes a link or, you can go directly to the web site: www.wa.gov/ago/consumer/index.shtml. The web site includes consumer information covering Auto Repair, Credit and Debt, Lemon Law, Identity Theft, Tele-marketing and Junk E-mail, Landlord/ Tenant, and much more. It also includes a link to file a complaint directly online.

While not strictly Consumer Protection, the Washington State Bar Association’s website includes a few pamphlets that address consumer protection. The pamphlet on Landlord/ Tenant law and a second one on Signing Documents are particularly useful. Anyone who anticipates signing any kind of contract should read the second pamphlet. In addition, the web page includes a link to the Ethics page for the public. The website is: www. wsba.org/public/consumer/default.htm.

The Washington State Trial Lawyers Association hosts the Center for Consumer Law. This web site has Links to many major consumer protection web sites, both state and federal, articles about issues such as health care and insurance, auto accidents, dealing with contractors and more. It hosts the “People’s Law School Citizen’s Hand-book,” which contains chapters on all these subjects, plus consumer law. The only problem appears to be that the web site is not current. The last update I could find was in 2002. In addition, while it contains the links I mentioned earlier, it misses many links that it should contain. Its web address is: www.consumerrights.net/.

For federal information, the best place to start is at the Firstgov for Consumers Home page: www.consumer.gov/. The real advantage of this web page is that it contains both Links to all the major federal government web sites for Consumer Protection and current articles on issues of importance to the public. For instance, on the day I looked at it for this column, it had an article on the Do Not Call Registry, one on the FTC Survey on Identity Theft and its costs, and one on Email Spam. The web site links to the Consumer Product Safety Web site, the Federal Citizen Information Center in Pueblo, Colorado, the Disability Info web site, the FTC site on Identity Theft, and much more.

FirstGov for Consumers is a “one-stop” link to federal information resources available online. It is designed so that users can locate information by category-such as Food, Health, Product Safety, Your Money, and Transportation. Each category has subcategories with links to areas within federal web sites containing related information.

One of the lessons I try to stress in my Internet classes is when to use a composite web site and when to use a search engine. It is much easier to use this web site than to try searching for your information via a search engine. This is a good example of when you “go to the source.”