The Ethics Of Data Brokers

c0d3h4x0r writes "MSNBC's Bob Sullivan asks, Whatever happened to the ChoicePoint bill? and raises some good points: 'Few experts believe that there was a sudden lack of computer security this year. Rather, there was a sudden bout of truth, thanks to California state law. [...] But in other ways, all the legislation misses the point. The ChoicePoint data leak story was not really about identity theft. It was about this: "Who the hell is ChoicePoint, and why is it making money selling my personal information?"' This makes me wonder what the Slashdot crowd thinks: should anyone be able to sell information about you at all? The general public seems to think not, while our elected officials seem to think it's just fine. How does the information gathered and sold by data brokers differ from the information collected and sold by a private investigator, or is there even a real difference?"

Comments

someone has to...

[Anonymous Coward]

someone has to collect and distribute this stuff for things like background checks. are we suggesting the govt should do it instead of the private sector?

Re:someone has to...

[kiatoa]

Government or private sector what difference? Historical evidence suggests to me that neither is trustworthy. Now, if there was a 50% cut to me every time $$ were made on selling my data I probably wouldn't care anymore about who else profits.

Re:someone has to...

[max born]

Not necessarily.

We could go back to the way it used to be done before the credit reporting bureaus. If somebody wants to give you a credit card or a loan they can ask you for a reference. You go to your bank or your current creditors and authorize them to give the you a reference in the form of a summary of your financial history or whaterver they need that you're prepared to give.

We could close all the other agencies down and the system would still work.

Sell Me Out

[fishybell]

Sure, why not? Sell all the information you have about me.

How else would I be able to find out what credit cards I pre-approved for?

copyright time?

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

if collections of facts can be copyrighted (e.g. maps & dictionaries), couldn't you copyright your personal data?

it's all a collection of facts, generated by you being alive and doing stuff. so you should automatically own copyright.

so therefore anyone who knows anything about you should be guilty of infringement..and if they sell it, they should be guilty of distribution.

Re:copyright time?

[cpt kangarooski]

No. In fact, not just no, but hell no. It's a stupid idea.

Facts are not copyrightable. So if you write down that you have brown hair, I can extract that fact and use it myself without infringing. Since there's no copyright, there's nothing to infringe on.

Compilations of facts might be copyrightable, but are not necessarily so. In order to be copyrightable, a compilation must possess originality, i.e. a creative selection and arrangement of components. All facts is not a creative selection. Ordinary arrangements, e.g. chronological, or alphabetical, is not a creative arrangement. It is fairly difficult to construct a copyrightable factual compilation (mostly it is a matter of creative selection).

As facts remain uncopyrightable, they can be copied from the copyrighted compilation, so long as the compilation itself is not copied. Furthermore, they can be observed from the source. So long as the copyrighted work is not itself copied, it is not infringing to have an identical, independently produced work, however the facts within are obtained. While it's possible to claim that sufficient similarity is indicative of copying (think of the odds of monkeys on typewriters) access is required to allege this. Since we're talking about information you don't want made public, there would presumably be no public copies which a purported infringer could've copied from, so similarity doesn't work for you.

But this is all dancing around the central issue: living your life and in the process producing facts is not an act of creative authorship. Just because you do something doesn't mean that you own the fact of it, or that the fact of it, by itself, is a creative work. You'd need to write it down. And even then, you can only protect what you write, as opposed to the uncopyrightable material within or the independently observable facts your writing is based upon.

Privacy is an interesting issue, particularly given the ability to store, search, and correlate vast quantities of information quickly and automatically. But it has nothing to do with copyright. Again, your post was pretty stupid.

Sue the bastards and shut them down

[rimcrazy]

These bastards almost shut down the sale of my home due to incorrect info in their database and then they want me to pay to correct it. If I had my way they should require me to approve who they want to sell my info to before a sale goes through and then I deserve a cut of every sale.

A scary look into the future...

[Chris Huelsbeck]

http://www.adcritic.com/interactive/view.php?id=59 27

The way to the Darkside...

[Karma_fucker_sucker]

If Government starts doing the collecting that will the intial steps towards monitoring of its citizens. And, unlike the private sector, there's really no accountability. Just look at what happens to people who are mistakenly put on the "No-Fly" list. They're fucked unless they have political connections. And even then it can be a real hassle - Ted Kennedy anyone? At least with a corp., you can bring a civil case and maybe a criminal. Government, years of hassles - even if you get permission to sue.

No sir, I'll take corporate over government anyday.

Is there another choice?

[JimJinkins]

In a small town information brokering is not a feasible business, but personal information is shared. Examples:

"He pays his bills on time."

"He pays his bills, but usually late."

He is a good plumber, but he will not answer a call during deer season."

"He is a good guy and a lousy electrician."

In an urban society, reputations established by gossip is not available. But reputation is still necessary for people to do business with each other.

Whether information is collected and sold by a business or collected by a government and sold for money or taxes is another issue. The information has to come from someone.

Whoever provides the information will screw it up at least part of the time.

Note: There are also disadvantages to the small town model. Consider prejudice and spite.

Credit reporting == lower prices, more services

[G4from128k]

someone has to collect and distribute this stuff for things like background checks. are we suggesting the govt should do it instead of the private sector?

Very insightful comment and I'm glad it got upmodded.

As a consumer I'm really of two minds on this issue. On the one hand, I hate that all this data is sitting out there. But on the otherhand, i realize its the price one pays to get a reasonable mortgage rate, credit cards on favorable terms, low insurance premiums, and a wide range of services at acceptable prices. Without accurate credit reporting, all businesses would need to increase prices to factor in the risk of loss and the added costs of extracting late payments.

As long as people expect businesses to take risks on them (lending money, providing service without up-front payment, entering into long-term service contracts, etc.), those businesses will want to collect information on the riskiness of those consumers. And if a consumer doesn't have an established relationship with a given business, then it makes sense that that business will need to ask other business that have done business with that consumer. And rather than have each business pester every other business with questions, it makes sense that other businesses would form to collect and sell consumer payment/risk data. Thus we get to the question of who should do this?

I fear that the government would be utterly incompetent at creating such a system, even if consumers did decide that all their purchase/payment history data should go to the government. The government would have little incentive to create accurate risk models. Because there is no a priori obvious way to estimate a given consumer's risk of non-payment, it's sensible to have multiple credit risk analysis companies each with their own scoring system. The final question is how should they do this?

What we need are better laws to ensure that the data is properly secured, properly vetted, fairly computed, and that consumers have some due process rights to contest erroneous data.