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."

Comments

Already in the wrong hands

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Personal information...

[Mori Chu]

I shudder to think that my personal information might be getting into the wrong hands without proper permission.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I was just interacting with my pal, Bonzi Buddy...

WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

[TheKidWho]

So now people who happen to find SS cards can actually find out whose SS it is. Here comes better identity theft!

Re:So now...

[pvt_medic]

Well lets see take a college database of student IDs, run it through this and you have probably 8,000 viable people to rip off. And for all of you who think that the university closely protects our data, i cant tell you how many times a teacher will post grades by SSN or even seen name and SSN. I try to explain to them that its illegal, and against university policies but i gave up when the university posted a list of kids by social security numbers. Dont need to slip for someone to get my data, idiots like that give it out for free.

So it's OK for Macy's to use it?!?

[drdanny_orig]

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.

Already easy to do on the web

[Stugots]

There have for some time been a plethora of web-based services allowing you do exactly the same kind of background checking, with the same level of business license verification. (Or non-verification, depending on your point of view...)

This is really more of a packaging / marketing / merchandising issue, than a technical or even a legal issue.

In fact, since surfing the web is much easier than installing software, I wonder if this product will cause any increase in the occasions of misuse of background checking. Anyone who wants to do it but shouldn't be able to, already can take a crack at it via the web.

Wrong hands?

[ilsa]

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.

Business License

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, maybe they have good intentions, but really??? I am 21 yrs old and have a Federal Tax ID to run a business (obtained for free through the IRS) and I can obtain a legitamite business license for around $50. So another words, I could use my FREE Tax ID and cheap business license to get this software and run background checks on anybody I want?? All I need is a social?? And a "forged" application of some sort (in case of an audit, I can "prove" they applied). Gee, save me some time researching on the internet. /me doesn't exist. You don't know me.. I'm a ghost... no really, I am. I love my privacy so LEAVE ME ALONE!! Take this software out of production.

Problem is that it's available AT ALL.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

Just a reminder ...

[pherris]

In the 2000 Presidential election ChoicePoint was the company that was the cause of the incorrect removal of thousands of voters from the State of Florida's voter rolls because were labelled as convicted felons. These voters were mostly black.

From Inside Republican America: A blacklist burning for Bush:

"The Observer discovered that Harris's office had ordered the elimination of 8,000 Florida voters on the grounds that they had committed felonies in other states. None had. Harris bought the bum list from a company called ChoicePoint, a firm whose Atlanta executive suite and boardroom are filled with Republican funders. ChoicePoint, we have learned, picked up the list of faux felons from state officials in - ahem - Texas. In fact, it was a roster of people who, like their Governor, George W, had committed nothing more than misdemeanours."

From Firm in Florida election fiasco earns millions from files on foreigners:

"The controversy is not the first to engulf ChoicePoint. The company's subsidiary, Database Technologies, was responsible for bungling an overhaul of Florida's voter registration records, with the result that thousands of people, disproportionately black, were disenfranchised in the 2000 election. Had they been able to vote, they might have swung the state, and thus the presidency, for Al Gore, who lost in Florida by a few hundred votes."

Simply put: ChoicePoint is evil. Welcome to Bush & Ashcroft's Amerika.