CFPB’s PFDR Rule Reconsideration - Question 1 Response

In August 2025, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) reopened its Personal Financial Data Rights Rule (PFDR Rule) for reconsideration under Docket No. CFPB-2025-0037. This action follows widespread concerns about the rule’s statutory grounding, its impact on consumer privacy, and its practical consequences for financial institutions and third parties. Safe Passage Strategies, LLC is engaging directly in this process. Our mission is to protect consumer and small business data sovereignty through principle-driven governance, transparent analytics, and ethical systems development. We believe that documenting our responses publicly not only advances accountability in the regulatory process but also provides a resource for businesses, policymakers, and citizens concerned with the future of financial data rights.

This category contains a series of posts — one for each of the Bureau’s 34 questions — providing formal, detailed responses. Each post addresses the statutory text, interpretive principles, constitutional implications, and data governance realities surrounding the PFDR Rule. By publishing these responses, Safe Passage Strategies aims to demonstrate both the legal defects of the rule and the broader risks of regulatory approaches that erode consumer and small business data sovereignty.

Response to Question 1:

I. The Plain Meaning of "Representative" Under Established Legal Principles

A "representative acting on behalf of an individual" carries centuries of established legal meaning requiring fiduciary duties - loyalty, care, confidentiality, and accountability to the principal's interests above all others. This interpretation flows from fundamental agency law principles and statutory construction canons that courts have applied consistently across federal law.

As Justice Scalia emphasized in Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, when Congress employs terms of art with established legal meanings, courts must honor those meanings rather than invent new definitions serving bureaucratic convenience.

II. The PFDR Rule's Interpretation Violates Basic Statutory Construction

The CFPB's interpretation fails multiple interpretive canons:

Canon Against Surplusage: Congress used three distinct terms - "agent, trustee, or representative" - each carrying specific fiduciary obligations. The rule collapses these into "any third party that files paperwork," rendering the statutory distinctions meaningless.

Plain Meaning Canon: The rule acknowledges statutory language requiring "representative acting on behalf of an individual," then immediately abandons it: "For convenience, part 1033 generally refers to...an agent, trustee, or representative acting on behalf of that individual as an 'authorized third party.'"

This "convenience" constitutes judicial legislation - rewriting statutory terms to achieve policy goals Congress never authorized.

III. Why This Interpretation Represents the Worst Possible Reading

A. It Destroys Consumer Data Sovereignty

Modern consumers understand data as the new currency and demand sovereignty over their financial information. The rule mandates the opposite - forced data sharing through government-created infrastructure.

From § 1033.201(a)(1): Banks "must make available" consumer data to third parties. Consumers cannot opt out of this mandatory sharing architecture - they can only attempt to control which government-approved entities access their private financial lives.

B. It Creates Surveillance Infrastructure Under False Consumer Protection Claims

My experience as a CFPB examiner reveals the rule's true purpose: regulatory data harvesting. Under §§ 1033.351(d) and 1033.441, detailed consumer transaction records become government intelligence through examination authority.

The CFPB suffered its own data breach in 2023, yet this rule grants political appointees - not technical experts - supervisory access to consumer financial behavior patterns. When government accesses one consumer's data during examinations, network effects reveal all consumers' patterns.

C. It Forces Consumers to Subsidize Their Own Data Exploitation

From § 1033.301(c): The fee prohibition forces consumers to bear compliance costs through indirect bank charges while third parties monetize consumer data for profit.

From § 1033.421(a)(2): The rule allows "targeted advertising," "cross-selling," and "data sales" as "standalone products" - creating forced unbundling that makes consumer data monetization more transparent and profitable for third parties.

D. It Violates Constitutional Principles

• Fourth Amendment: Creates unreasonable government access to private financial records through mandatory examination of data-sharing systems

• Fifth Amendment: Takes private property (consumer data sovereignty) without due process or just compensation

• Tenth Amendment: Exceeds federal authority by mandating private data-sharing infrastructure

IV. Conclusion

The CFPB's interpretation represents the worst possible reading of statutory language because it transforms consumer protection into institutionalized data theft. Congress intended to give consumers rights; the CFPB created obligations that serve data aggregators, government surveillance, and political manipulation of consumer behavior.

As Justice Ginsburg would demand: Where is the consumer protection when government forces private citizens to surrender data sovereignty to politically connected intermediaries who profit from that surrender?

This rule must be rescinded to restore genuine consumer data sovereignty and constitutional privacy protections.

We invite readers to explore each response in sequence and consider how the CFPB’s approach impacts not only financial institutions but also the very foundations of consumer rights in the digital economy. We also encourage stakeholders, small businesses, and concerned citizens to submit their own comments to the Bureau’s reconsideration docket, bringing forward perspectives from their unique experiences and expertise. You can do so here: Regulations.gov

Note on Publication Order:

Our responses are being published in real time. We are not proceeding in numerical order but instead prioritizing questions where Safe Passage Strategies has the most immediate insight, technical research, or legal analysis available. At present, we have completed responses to Questions 1, 18, and 28. Additional posts will be added to this category as research progresses, until all 34 questions are addressed in full.