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Sunday, August 03, 2008

Law - "If You Run a Red Light, Will Everyone Know?"

That is the headline to an essay today in the NY Times, written by Brad Stone, who covers Internet trends and consumer technology for the Times. Some quotes:

WANT to vet a baby sitter? Need to peek into the background of a prospective employee? Curious about the past of a potential date?

Last month, PeopleFinders, a 20-year-old company based in Sacramento, introduced CriminalSearches.com, a free service to satisfy those common impulses. The site, which is supported by ads, lets people search by name through criminal archives of all 50 states and 3,500 counties in the United States. In the process, it just might upset a sensitive social balance once preserved by the difficulty of obtaining public documents like criminal records.

Academics have a term for the old inaccessibility of records like those for criminal convictions: “practical obscurity.” Once upon a time, people in search of this data had to hire private investigators to navigate byzantine courthouses and rudimentary filing or computer systems, and to deal with often grim-faced legal clerks. In a way, the obstacles to getting criminal information maintained a valuable, ignorance-fueled civil peace. Convicts could start fresh after serving their time without strangers knowing their pasts, and there was little risk that unsophisticated researchers could confuse people with identical names.

Well, not anymore. The information on CriminalSearches.com is available to all comers. “Do you really know who people are?” the site blares in large script at the top of the page.

There is much more in the article. More is presented by the same author in this NYT Technology Blog entry by the same author headed "Is ChoicePoint a Model of Restraint in Releasing Criminal Records?" - it begins:
In Sunday’s paper, I write about CriminalSearches.com, the first free, ad-supported database of criminal archives in all 50 states and 3,500 counties in the United States. The site presents the entertaining and somewhat guilt-inducing opportunity to dig for dirt on all your friends and colleagues.

It also promises to tear apart the social fabric. What kind of society do we live in if people can look up criminal histories on each other without restriction, then rush to judgment based on incomplete and often confusing information? The story deals with that thorny question.

One perspective that did not make it into the piece came from data aggregator ChoicePoint. One of its divisions has the same records as CriminalSearches.com, but chooses to make them available only to companies and not the general public. I asked the company why.

Thoughts from the ILB: The story raises a number of issues. Here is one you may not have immediately thought of.

I checked my name on CriminalSearches.com and nothing turned up. Then I checked the names of a couple Indiana convicted criminals and nothing turned up. Then I did a search using only "Indiana" and 50 names turned up, but only two of them had an address in Indiana, and when I checked further, these were identified as "possible previous addresses."

Suspicious now, I picked a last name at random, "Mongomery," and added "Indiana" as the location. I got 16 results, with Indiana addresses. But as I looked at the details of each result, I did not find one that gave an Indiana entity as the source of the information.

Conclusion? Indiana crimes/convictions are not covered. But nothing on the site that I could find leads one to the conclusion that all jurisdictions are not covered. On the contrary, there is a drop-down box for Indiana.

At the end of the Times story, Bryce Lane, president of PeopleFinders, which runs the database, "compares his site to the seat belt, saying it will make everyone safer." Perhaps, but at least insofar as Indiana criminal history is concerned , it looks like people could rely on it to their detriment.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 3, 2008 12:25 PM
Posted to General Law Related