In these digital pages, Alan Sears, the founder of the Alliance Defending Freedom, recently defended the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s so-called open banking rule. The rule is the regulatory offspring of Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act. Sears’s essay proceeds from a sound and worthy premise: a love of religious freedom and robust competition. But it loses itself in a thicket of misapplied principles and misconceptions about its subject.

The open banking rule, finalized in 2024 , required banks to transfer customers’ financial data to third parties, including financial technology firms and data aggregators. Besides its heavy-handedness and the nearly impracticability of certain of its provisions, the construction of the data sharing regulations badly endangers Ameri

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