Data Broker Medbase200 Sold Lists of Rape & Domestic Violence Victims

McGruber writes "During her testimony (PDF) at a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing Wednesday about the data-broker industry, Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, revealed that the Medbase200 unit of Integrated Business Services Incorporated had been offering a list of 'rape sufferers' on its website, at a cost of $79 for 1,000 names. The company, which sells marketing information to pharmaceutical companies, also offered lists of domestic violence victims, HIV/AIDS patients, and 'peer pressure sufferers.' In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Integrated Business Services Incorporated President Sam Tartamella initially denied that his company maintained or sold databases of rape victims. After the Journal provided him a link to the 'rape sufferers' page, he said he would remove it from Medbase200's website and denied ever having sold such a list. The page was removed later Wednesday."

Comments

Big Data should be banned

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to know this information and you especially don't need to know this information in aggregate.

Re:Big Data should be banned

[Stormy Dragon]

So you want to ban the study of entire fields like sociology and economics, as well as things like the testing of new pharmaceuticals?

Re:Big Data should be banned

[ewieling]

It's hard to do any sort of study of large groups of people if you can't at some point collect and aggregate data about all the individuals involved.

I disagree. There is no need for information which identifies specific individuals when determining the effectiveness of a drug or medical procedure in a large group of people. There is no need for information which identifies specific individuals for market research or television ratings. Those are just a few examples. Data can be made anonymous without losing its usefulness.

Re:Big Data should be banned

[nbauman]

There is no need for information which identifies specific individuals when determining the effectiveness of a drug or medical procedure in a large group of people.

Not always.

On the most basic level, you want to distinguish male from female. There are some drugs and diseases that have a different course in men than women, so you want to go back and see whether that's the case in a particular study.

There are some genes that are more common in black caribbean populations, that affect the metabolism of opioids. So a normal dose of codeine for a cough might be fatal for a black caribbean person. So you want to know in the study how many people were black (and preferably of caribbean origin).

You want to know who's a smoker and who's a non-smoker.

This is particularly an issue when you have one study that says a treatment worked, another study that says it didn't work, and you want to go back and figure out why they're coming to different conclusions.

Re:Big Data should be banned

[Stickerboy]

It's hard to do any sort of study of large groups of people if you can't at some point collect and aggregate data about all the individuals involved.

I disagree. There is no need for information which identifies specific individuals when determining the effectiveness of a drug or medical procedure in a large group of people. There is no need for information which identifies specific individuals for market research or television ratings. Those are just a few examples. Data can be made anonymous without losing its usefulness.

Data can be made anonymous without losing its usefulness; however, data cannot be made anonymous without losing the ability to check its veracity.

If there is no real person connected to data in aggregate in a scientific study, then there is no way to prevent a scientist from making up data wholesale and padding the results to favor one outcome or another. Conversely, if a skeptical competitor levels charges of this against you, being unable to point to the real people that you derived the results from looks bad.

Re:Big Data should be banned

[Stormy Dragon]

No it can't. Even basic demographic data can be used to uniquely identify people. For example, {gender | birthdate | zip code} is a unique identifier for 87% of the people in this country:

http://dataprivacylab.org/projects/identifiability/paper1.pdf

Time to sell List of CEOs home addresses

[tekrat]

I think I'm starting a business which will sell data on the 1% to anyone who wants it. It's time to even the odds.

Re:Time to sell List of CEOs home addresses

[MRe_nl]

Slashdot IS the 1%: You need just $34,000 annual income to be in the global elite.

Re:Time to sell List of CEOs home addresses

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's time to change the copyright laws so the subject of information has joint ownership of copyright on the information, with no implicit licensing. In other words, if you collect data about me in the course of our business relationship, it's private, and you may not retransmit it without my explicit, informed consent.

Captcha: nausea (how appropriate)

Re:Time to sell List of CEOs home addresses

[tlhIngan]

Slashdot IS the 1%: You need just $34,000 annual income to be in the global elite.

I find that number to be wrong on many levels.

First, 1% of the population is about 70M people.

You're telling me that out of the population of the US, Canada and Western Europe, that only 70M of those people make more then $34,000?

If they were all Americans, that means 3 out of every 4 Americans make less than $34,000, a number I feel is high, especially when you add in the populations of Western Europe.

Additionally, I would think a there would be a significant number of those people in say, China (where income inequality is HUGE)..

I would believe the number is much closer to the top 5-8% of the population makes $34,000+.

Re:Time to sell List of CEOs home addresses

[Valdrax]

Uhhhh... there are many more places in the world than that. The OP is right - if you're here, you're most likely part of the global 1%.

The total population of the US, Canada, and the EU, as of 2008 is 550 million people out of a total global population of about 6.7 billion. 8% > 1%.

Of course, this is an irrelevant distraction, because the phrase "the 1%" was coined to cover the top 1% of Americans, not the world.

Re:Time to sell List of CEOs home addresses

[PraiseBob]

Welcome to the global elite. Don't worry, thanks to geography and luck, you don't even have to be good at math.

Re:Time to sell List of CEOs home addresses

[Stormy Dragon]

It still hobbles the ability of whistle blowers and reporters to inform the public. For example, Toronto Star reporters Kevin Donovan and Robyn Doolittle could be arrested for revealing the video of Rob Ford smoking crack without his permission.

Re:Time to sell List of CEOs home addresses

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you need from me?

Just your name, address, favourite pet's name and cup size.

Anonymous Coward
127.0.0.1
Tux
16 FL. Oz.

Re:Time to sell List of CEOs home addresses

[Rob Riggs]

In the United States 25% of the >15 year old population has a personal income > $50K

You are mixing per-capita income (mine) with the income of wage earners (yours). That is the same misleading comparison the web site I linked to was tempting potential donors with.

A clearer picture can be had by looking here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States

The first big table has "household income" as well as "household size". This shows that one needs to be near the top 10% before you get to "$47,500 per capita" rate that is considered "the global 1%".

I am not downplaying the fact that the U.S. has a lot of wealth compared to the rest of the world. But some of the numbers thrown around are used in a misleading manner. For example, the site I linked to above was trying to get wage earners to compare their personal or household income with some "global per capita wage" and not asking for their household wage and number of household members, which would be a more fair comparison.

Re:Time to sell List of CEOs home addresses

[H0p313ss]

Sometime around the age of 12 one of my children commented "I wish we were rich."

I stopped the car and turned around, "We are rich." I said

"Both your mother and I both earn enough money to have a house and a car. You are always clothed and fed, you never go to bed hungry and cold. You get to travel, play sports and get a good education. Nobody forces you to work, ever. You don't have to fetch water just to survive, morning noon and night"

"Remember that there are tens of millions of people around the world who have none of these things, and you have them all."

I turned around and continued driving.

Years later my daughter reminded me of the conversation and how it had triggered a kind of awakening.

Re:Time to sell List of CEOs home addresses

[TheGratefulNet]

damn right!

I may be '1%' compared to some poor schuck in india or china but I'm not even close to 1% in my own country, where the comparison really matters.

those who shift the argument to 'world-wide' are intellectually dishonest.

Re:Time to sell List of CEOs home addresses

[skegg]

In the context of parent's comment, yes, that matters very much.

After all, what is the average cost of living in India or China?

Re:Time to sell List of CEOs home addresses

[Tom]

With ~two billion people living of off 2 dollars a day or less, with no chance of any meaningful education or healthcare, I believe it to be a rather strong argument.

No, it isn't.

I'm sure a hundred million kids get beaten daily. Doesn't make it right to beat yours.

Some evil somewhere else does not justify an evil here and now.

Re:Time to sell List of CEOs home addresses

[JWSmythe]

I used to be in that business, I'll tell you ... it's already out there. I'm very glad I'm no longer anywhere near the industry. I'd feel better dealing with hitmen and druglords.

Some of the Fortune 1000 crowd have their data flagged. If you have access to a service that provides such information, and you search for say "Bill Gates", there will be a shitstorm.

We were told by some 3rd party data sources that we were contractually obliged to maintain a list of "high profile" people, so those searches would always return empty. I pushed them for who "high profile" was. Bill Gates was obvious, because that was the reason the conversation came up. Theoretically, the list should include the Fortune 1000 crowd, and anyone who shows up in the news. They couldn't provide parameters, so that obligation wasn't possible to fulfill.

And on that specific search, they weren't searching for the obvious Bill Gates of Microsoft. It was someone with the same name in another state on an authorized background check.

The amount of data that I was exposed to was absolutely insane. Pretty much, I could tell you stuff about yourself that you may not even remember, plus your neighbors, relatives, romantic partners, and people you associate with. It was down to your hobbies, shopping habits, and even photos and messages from social media.

Re:Time to sell List of CEOs home addresses

[nbauman]

Sometime around the age of 12 one of my children commented "I wish we were rich."

I stopped the car and turned around, "We are rich." I said

"Both your mother and I both earn enough money to have a house and a car. You are always clothed and fed, you never go to bed hungry and cold. You get to travel, play sports and get a good education.

That must have been a long time ago, or you must have a lot of money. In order to get a good education today, you have to be rich. Not only does a college education cost at least $20,000 a year, but in the U.S. you usually have to live in an expensive neighborhood to go to a good K-12 education.

Nobody forces you to work, ever.

She never has to work? Even to make her living expenses? What does she have, a trust fund? She is rich.

Re:Time to sell List of CEOs home addresses

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Well that's the point isn't it? They don't have it so good here. The fact that people elsewhere are held in worse conditions is immaterial just the way a man who beats and rapes a woman can't turn around to that woman and say "you have it so good, I didn't sell you into slavery.."

The fact is way too many Americans DON'T have to good - period. They have it pretty bad in fact. 22% of children live in outright poverty. When you look at how "poverty" is defined, it's really far far worse than that sounds 18.6K a year for a family of 3.

Perhaps you'd accept an employers logic that you should be paid 18.6 k a year because , hey, an entire *family* can make that much and STILL be OK. Or perhaps you'd find that logic exploitative, self-serving and irrelevant and the lifestyle which was forced on you by those wages grinding and abusive leaving you little in terms of time, money or energy so you could advance yourself.

The people who have it good ARE the top 1% and they're doing it at other people's expense, and to their own detriment BTW. Distorting laws and markets , in the long run hurts everyone. The problem is that run is long enough for an entire lifetime to play out nicely for the distorter. Given that people will do drugs that ruin their entire lives almost immediately in order to feel good for a very brief time, we can't expect the system to ever self correct.

The "you have it so good relative to X" is a fascist meme (not saying you yourself are fascist ! ! ). Scratch the surface and you'll see It's used almost exclusively to excuse abuse by an abuser or an enabler or sympathsizer of the enabler or, at best, someone who heard it and thought it sounded tough and realistic is a macho "life's tough, get over it" kinda way.

Re:Time to sell List of CEOs home addresses

[nbauman]

Every time I hear somebody say, "You don't know how good you have it here," I think of the 1960s underground comics artist Gilbert Shelton and his character Wonder Warthog, who used to go around saying that. "In other countries, the government tells people what they can eat, drink and smoke." I can't find the right cartoon, but here's a different one to give you the idea. http://bdtrash.forumdediscussions.com/t1410-wonder-wart-hog-super-heros-dejante-de-gilbert-shelton

"You don't know how good you have it here" is a cold war meme that was used to compare us to Soviet Russia.

The interesting thing was that they took the worst features of American capitalist society, and argued that in Russia it was even worse. They were projecting our own flaws on Russia.

Paul Robeson and Linus Pauling weren't allowed to have a passport because the passport office didn't like their politics? Well, in Russia, people are put in jail just for wanting to leave.

Communists are sent to jail here for printing books and newspapers the government doesn't like? Well, in Russia, people are shot for saying things the government doesn't like.

Now, they don't have the Soviet Union to kick around any more.

People who can't afford health care are going bankrupt? Well, in Canada and England you have to wait six months to see a doctor.

How Fucked is That???

[CanHasDIY]

Medbase200 unit of Integrated Business Services Incorporated had been offering a list of 'rape sufferers' on its website, at a cost of $79 for 1,000 names. The company, which sells marketing information to pharmaceutical companies, also offered lists of domestic violence victims, HIV/AIDS patients, and 'peer pressure sufferers.'

Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm going ahead and putting in my application with Uncle Enzo's CosaNostra Pizza Corporation...

Utterly despicable

[Chas]

As if these poor peoples' lives weren't already shitty enough.
Now we have a bunch of marketeer ass-hats singling them out as unique business opportunities.
Yet again, making me wish I owned a gun, yet glad I don't, since I'd shoot these motherfuckers in a heartbeat.

Re:Utterly despicable

[jhumkey]

I remember as a teenager, my mother telling about a miscarriage she had a few years after I was born (too young to remember). Apparently they did a D&C afterwards (to scrap residue off the walls). But, hospitals (at that time at least) must've listed some Abortions as D&C's.
(At the time of the conversation) its 13+ years later and someone had just stolen some hospital records and was harrasing recent D&C patients for "having Abortions" . . .
She was horror struck at what it must've been like, for those "want to be mothers", still suffering the tragedy of having lost a child unwillingly . . . to have some dipwad confront them and accuse them of having an Abortion.
Patient records should be sacrosanct for a reason.

Re:Utterly despicable

[the eric conspiracy]

My wife had a miscarriage like this.

Dipwad isn't the right word. I don't think human language is capable of expressing what this triggers in me.

Re:Utterly despicable

[Chas]

Usually it's a non-verbal expression...

It starts with a clenching of the fists...and ends with the bastard basically homogenized over every surface within eyesight.

Not surprised

[benjfowler]

You have to expect this, when the only legal and moral duty that directors and managers of their companies are to look after their shareholders. And even then, the shareholders get raped by the boss class.

As a society, we reap what we sow, when we let them get sufficiently powerful, that they can simply buy favourable laws and regulations and tell the world to get fucked.

This will be the undoing of Western civilisation -- our inability to contain the power of a feral, out-of-control overclass.

To all those who reply to privacy concerns...

[cervesaebraciator]

with, "if you've nothing to hide," I hope this will make you consider how much privacy has to do with simple human dignity.

Re:To all those who reply to privacy concerns...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention safety. I was an IT contractor for a community outreach group that ran a number of safe homes for victims of rape and domestic violence. The addresses of those houses was very, very closely guarded, and the security measures in place to keep everything under wraps was dialed up to 11. Any lapses could potentially cost someone their life. Anyone responsible for selling this info needs to be locked up for a good, long time, and the articles of incorporation should be immediately dissolved.

Re:To all those who reply to privacy concerns...

[SpaceManFlip]

you eloquent bastard, you have simply nailed the paradigm, and I applaud your truthiness

Also for the other person mentioning doing IT work for rape shelter stuff - I bet it wouldn't be very hard to find volunteer armed guards for those types of safe houses. I personally, having known a few abuse victims, would view sitting around with a shotgun to ward off rapist/beaters as an honorable task. That would be a good community-outreach-volunteer program to get going in a lot of places: volunteer rape victim guard services etc

a fine point

[BradMajors]

She said they would remove the listing from their website. She did not say she would stop selling or even destroy such a list.

Re:a fine point

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

She said they would remove the listing from their website. She did not say she would stop selling or even destroy such a list.

Whether you take those words at face value or not, one thing they haven't even tried to deny is that they sell lists of people with other medical conditions, like diabetes. It is spelled out right there in the article.

"They"

[careysb]

Who are the "they" that are selling the list. Let's see names, addresses, phone numbers, family member names, etc..

Re:speaking of lists

[davester666]

It probably already is linked, only not in the way you think...