Slashdot Mirror
Background-Check Software Goes Retail
Makarand writes "According to this article in the Mercury News, ChoicePoint Inc.,
one of the nation's largest vendors of personal, financial and legal data is attempting to
mass market a
background-check software tool-kit which can be used to tap into ChoicePoint's online
databases. Choicepoint requires that you have a business license to run a small business to use this software.
However, as users of these services are rarely audited or asked to produce their business license, the purchaser can potentially
conduct criminal background checks, Social Security number identification and other checks on anyone for a small fee. Privacy advocates are cautioning that making background-check software a consumer product could
easily put personal information into the wrong hands."
The govt needs to do a better job of regulating personal data. I guess passing tax cuts for the wealthy is more important than protecting the privacy of individuals. Businesses get what they pay for, a system of government for the Business by the Business.
I wonder if this will ever change.
Privacy advocates are cautioning that making background-check software a consumer product could easily put personal information into the wrong hands.
I would argue this info IS ALREADY in the wrong hands and the commoditization of such info merely creates a balance by giving that same access to the little guy (or reasonably little guy).
I can understand that there are legitimate uses for this; I can see why a parent would like background checks on babysitters for my kids and such.
But the larger question is, what is this society coming to? Why are we becoming so paranoid about everything? Everyone wants their own privacy, but then they're willing to go and spy on other people to find out more about them...
I don't know. It's early on a Sunday... just throwing some thoughts out.
So now people who happen to find SS cards can actually find out whose SS it is. Here comes better identity theft!
How does a business license make someone any more reputable? If the guy at the corner Likker-n-Lotto can buy this software, we may as well give it out for free on street corners. "Wrong hands" indeed.
.nosig
One of the scariest parts about this article is that it assumes that this kind of software usually puts private information into "right" hands. In a world where your personal socializing habits are grounds for failing a background check, it really blurs the concept of "the wrong hands."
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Yes, because Osama bin Laden represents the largest single threat to the American Way of Life (TM). Everything changed after 911! Think of the children! The sky is falling, the sky is falling!
Fucking sheep. You disgust me.
Privacy advocates are cautioning that making background-check software a consumer product could easily put personal information into the wrong hands.
OK, what planet have these "privacy advocates" been living on? Could easily put? Hasn't personal information been in the wrong hands already for years now? Hell, forget buying software, all you've needed for YEARS has been $100 or so, and you can get your hands on whatever personal information you want on almost whoever you want, from any number of private investigation companies, online and offline.
Just a couple examples:
Background Check International's fee structure
Checkmate.com's fee structure
BackgroundFile background check software
Many many more, this was just the first few I found on a google search. Choice Point is just jumping on the gravy train. Whooptie do.
Oh heck, this can be abused in the "right hands" too. So you need a "business license" to get this? Easily obtained.
And lets say you are a manager someplace that has access to this information, and your college aged daughter has a new boyfriend? Easy enough to check up on him, isn't it. Oh, and it isn't abuse of the system because it's to protect your little girl.
As long as you are using the company equipment, have a neighbor you don't like? Easy enough to find out more about who he really is, too. And it's just to protect your family.
The "Two IDs" sketch of "Amazon Women on the Moon" and that brokerage commercial where the guy is freaked out by his blind date knowing everything about him are not far away from reality now.
-- I Am Not A Terrorist.
The difficulty here is that the effort to get "public" information is part of how we have traditionally shielded our personal privacy.
To wit, if you live in LA and I live in Seattle, if there's a ton of information "public" about you in an LA courthouse, it's very hard for me to get at it. It may be legal for me to get at it, but it is harder. If you piss me off with a comment in a Usenet newsgroup, I can't easily start drilling into your life.
But if I can surf the web or run a program from my home and dig up information on you, it's far easier for me to harass you from afar.
There are valid arguments on both side of the issue. Yes, public information should be equally accessible to all. Yes, easy accessibility makes it easier for unscrupulous characters to get leverage on you from afar. Ever been stalked?
Who do you think benefits when businesses benefit? No one? The big giant millionaire man hell-bent on creating conspiracies to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. The people who work for that business benefit. The investors in that business benefit. As has been mentioned previously here on /., most stock of large corporations is held in pension funds, IRAs, 401(K) Plans, and from shares in mutual hunds held by individual investors. The owner/CEO of a business/corporation isn't the only one who benefits when a business/corporation does well.
/. for anyone who makes a lot of money. We have a progressive tax system in the U.S., meaning proportionally if you make more money, you pay more in taxes on the theory that it's less of a burden for the richer person to pay more to help support the poorer person. Why is it evil and conspiratorial if the government decides to give some money back to the people who are paying most of it (I think it was a stupid idea but that doesn't make it evil)
Now I'm not going to argue that Bush's tax cut was a good idea (it wasn't, IMHO) or that Bush is good for the economy (he's not, IMHO) or am I going to argue against your initial statement (that the govt should do a better job of regulating personal data). I am going to say however that you made an insightful comment (govt should do a...) and followed it up w/ crud about how it's wasting it's time trying to help the wealthy - a completely separate argument.
I get very angry at all the hatred I see on
Choicepoint requires that you have a business license to run a small business to use this software. However, as users of these services are rarely audited or asked to produce their business license, the purchaser can potentially conduct criminal background checks, Social Security number identification and other checks on anyone for a small fee.
What's so magic about a "licensed business", that limiting the data to them would do anything useful?
Crooks license businesses all the time, as do pathologically-lying psychopathic scumbags that manage to stay barely within the law.
Look at a used-car lot some time. Or nearly ANY sales organization. Or the executive suite of any corporation. Or middle-management at a job near you.
And tightening up the requirements for business licenses, or enforcing business-license requirements for disclosure of the data, will do no good and much harm. The crooks, who do their crookery for a living, will still have the time and incentive to hop through any hoops set up, or to skate around them. (As by setting up a business to sell the info under-the-table to their hands-on bretheren.)
Increasing the threshold for access, while still leaving it available to "licensed businesses", just further increases the subjugation of the general population. Why should any seller on E-Bay have less access to credit information on his potential customers (whom he has NEVER seen) than your local five-and-dime? Why should you be unable to check what the company is saying about YOU when asked by a "licensed business", and have to TRUST them to keep your data correct, and to give you the same info they give paying customers if you ask for a check?
The problem is not that it's "too easy" to "fake" being a "licensed business".
The problem is that the information is available to businesses AT ALL.
Privacy advocates are cautioning that making background-check software a consumer product could easily put personal information into the wrong hands.
That's just another aspect of the general empowerment of both the little guy and the big guy by the technological revolution.
Invasion of privacy has had limited impact before automation because it was so costly that it could only be applied rarely and selectively - typically only by government. Now it's cheap. So perhaps we need to protect it explicitly when we could mostly let it slide before, largely protected, like sheep, by fading into a large visually-identical crowd.
But if it needs protecting it needs EQUAL protection from ALL players (including government). Making it available only to "licensed businesses", thus giving it to the crooks while keeping it from the honest individuals and raising the cost-of-entry and/or risk-of-entry for small businesses, just won't cut it.
If it's public record, anybody should be able to see it. If it's not, nobody should. Then focus on defining and enforcing THAT.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The point is you do have to get up and go there. It brings the cost up. You have to track down all the diverse physical locations the data is kept and visit them to gleen the info. You are less likely to go through that without a legit need versus just sitting at home and getting the scoop on all you're neighbors, co-workers, etc. with a couple of clicks.
You must be new here (earth I mean, not Slashdot). Humans are imperfect, therefore they make mistakes. The smart ones will learn from these mistakes and move on. The problem is, products like this make it hard to move on short of dying and reincarnating.
Choicepoint requires that you have a business license to run a small business to use this software. However, as users of these services are rarely audited or asked to produce their business license, the purchaser can potentially conduct criminal background checks, Social Security number identification and other checks on anyone for a small fee.
So, why can't they use their uber-database to see if a potential customer has a business license???
If their software is so dense as to miss obvious publicly available information like that, then I wouldn't worry.
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Court records are public info, marriage certificates are public info, and many business transactions result in a public record. Really, your enitre life is published, it's just in so many disorganized places that it's hard for anybody to put it all together.
However, that's where technology comes in. Once all of those databases are converted from paper to bits, and then the tables are brought together and cross-linked, you can get a very scary pile of information just by having a name and address, or a social security number alone.
And really, the laws to regulate the use of such a database don't exist because, well, it hasn't really been fully done yet. But it seems like we keep getting closer and closer to the day where such a system will fully have the kinks knocked out and be availalbe to anybody who can pay for it...
Wow, spoken like someone who doesn't have kids. Between my wife and I we watch our son 90+% of the time but there are times when we are both working where we need a baby sitter, or we want to go out together to enjoy a little bit of "us" time without our son. Luckily for us we live within ~10 miles of both sets of grandparents and so finding a reliable, trustworthy babysitter isn't a problem but I can definitly sympathise with people who don't have the luxury.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Why is being a business a more valid reason to have access to this data than being an individual? Oh I forgot, business is the new "law" in the USA...
The reason we don't, of course, is that we simply didn't know that these things were going on. Now we have a fear-mongering media which, if nothing else, convinces us not to trust anyone.
So from where I see, there are two ways to look at this: (a) we were extremely foolish/ignorant when we used to hire babysitters without a background check; or (b) we're acting irrationally now by not trusting anybody. It's probably a little bit of both?
And who are YOU to decide how other people should raise their kids? You probably are not married, have no kids and no house payments to make. For most of the families on my block, most require two incomes just to stay even and maybe save a little for retirement. And this is in an average middle class neighborhood in the Midwest. We are raising our children just fine, thank you, and have a hell of a lot better understanding of how much responsibilty children are (and how much they cost) than you do to judge by your clueless opinion. I mean WTF? You think only the wealthy should have kids?
FreeSpeech.org
One simple solution to all of this: Whenever someone is researched by a third party like this, why can't it be mandatory that the researcher be positively identified, and the target of research must be notified of the research within 1-2 months unless a court decides that there's criminal activity worthy of suppressing these details?
When a dog kills someone, they are put down, no trial, no rights. When a human kills someone they are (ideally)arrested put to trial and convicted, then punished (killed or imprisoned). When a gang kills someone, the police try the individuals that did it, and the rest keep going. When a corporation kills people they are often sued, pay some money and keep going. Businesses are not treated like groups of people; legally speaking (in the US) they are treated as individuals, removing their employees from liability of their actions. If they were treated like a group of people, I would call them that, but they aren't and so we must deal with them differently. I don't want their money, but I want them to lose some power and allow other people an equal say in how their lives should be run.
America is such a paradise where only one parent is required to work to support the family.
However most people are not willing for this lifestyle. It means you buy used a car, and keep it running (one, not three or four). It means the kids share a bedroom, girls in one, boys in the other. (Note, compare this to the 1800s where one room cabins smaller than those bedrooms sometimes slept families of 10) It means eating out is a rare celebration, with most meals cooked at home, and even then cheap meals. It means that you never go to the movies, and watch broadcast TV on your free TV from someone who upgraded, and if you can't see the bottom third of the TV because it is broken too bad. It means you books come from the library. It means your clothing is cheap, and not in style.
Note that this is not living in poverty. There is plenty of good food (and healthier than what passes for food at most resteraunts). There are warm clothes, and they don't have holes in them.
As for if it is better? Well that is complex, but if you are not willing to live the above you should not have kids. Love is important for raising kids, somehow you need to keep them out of trouble, while teaching them how to make their own decisions. And a million other things. How you do it is up to the parents, there are thousands of different ways that work. Living on one income can be done, but you can turn out good kids one two if you must. I think it is easier on one income, but either way there are hardships.
However, as users of these services are rarely audited or asked to produce their business license, the purchaser can potentially conduct criminal background checks, Social Security number identification and other checks on anyone for a small fee.
This has been available for years. You can already do a combined credit check, criminal history check, and background check (including known aliases, current address, past addresses and cohabitors, marriages, divorces, etc.) for under $100 from sites like USSearch.com. All they ask for is your credit card number -- they don't care if you're a business owner, stalker, or what have you.
As Calvin Coolidge stated, "The business of America is business." The American government and the press have ALWAYS catered to the business class.
Debunking the "59 Deceits"