ChoicePoint -- What We Learned from Our Screw-up

xpangler points out an article in Baseline magazine in which "ChoicePoint's lead privacy & compliance executives talks about the 'more than 30' new practices and procedures the company has put in place since it mistakenly sold private data on 163,000 people to Nigerian criminals last year."

Comments

Now they need to do quality control

[meburke]

ChoicePoint is an aggregator. As much as 20% of their data could be inaccurate. Employers (for instance) make decisions based on ChoicePoint data, even though ChoicePoint "suggests" that they independently verify the accuracy of any negative reports. (Of course, it may work the other way also: 20% inaccuracy suggests that ChoicePoint will give subscribers false positive data, too.) Is this important? Well, Baseline Magazine wrote a nice article on this last year, http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,1825320 ,00.asp
http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,1825287 ,00.asp
and I was really impressed with the fact that a Home Depot employee spent a week in jail for crimes he did not commit.

Security is only half of it; Accuracy is the other half.