Tired of getting hosed by your card company? You’re in luck: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) just launched its consumer complaint site today. As a forum for angry credit card holders, the Complaint Database displays infographics in all shapes and sizes, and is pretty stylish and readable for being the product of a bureaucratic agency.But it’s a new set of social features that sets the CFPB site apart. Government commissions have long collected millions of consumer complaints through their auto-reply e-mail addresses, answering machines, snail mail and filed grievances, etc. But CFPB is now doing what might be illegal in many countries that use Republic in their name: granting the ability to easily generate tweets and Facebook posts — CFPB places buttons at the top of their site — like 3rd-base-coaches for conflicted consumers.CFPB’s credit card complaint site grants people pissed over their plastic the venue to vent out. With a handy discussion-wall side-widget, and embed code generators, the site makes it simple for consumers to download and visualize data. You can export data in eight formats including XML, PDF, CSV, which is laymen friendly, as CFPB aims beyond the sharpened wits of financial geographers and academic database gurus. By beautifying and publicly posting these otherwise mundane records, and graphing neat pie-charts, misty-eyed consumers could come again as torrential downpours on classic disputes: Sudden APR changes, unwarranted late fees, payment date changes, inaccurate reporting, and more.Don’t we all bitch about our credit cards? Of course, but it’s never been as simple as submitting to Digg. Slicing out the web-generation of would-be Clark Howard listeners, the bureau’s site has already attracted hundreds of visitors, with last year’s existing complaints loaded onto the interface, so we can watch as old-timer complaint demographics are shaped with what the new site might attract.Allowing these interactions on a .gov website and giving consumers a voice against low-quality lending might seem like a small drop in the bucket. Plus, it’ll probably attract those pernicious re-posters, 4channers, and other mischief makers (the CFPB might have a few things to learn from Reddit). But if other traditionally tech-conservative government agencies become engaged with the concept, the social web could work to promote the key aspect of our democracy: the people’s voice.
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