The offshore outsourcing of customer service call center and data center services to locations outside of the U.S. has become a fairly standard business practice in many industries. Now, a consumer class action lawsuit filed against Bank of America on Aug. 3, 2011 challenges the financial industry's practice of transferring customer service calls to offshore call centers staffed with foreign nationals, alleging that doing so puts the privacy of customers' financial information at risk - not from hackers and thieves, but from surveillance by the U.S. government.

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