You Did *What*? Searching “Criminal” Records Online

This NYTimes is carrying an interesting essay about a new site called CriminalSearches.com (you’re welcome to cut and paste it to see it – I’m just not giving it the benefit of a link).   The author explains:

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.

Go ahead, you can search me.  You’ll find both an incomplete (I must admit that I have received more than two speeding tickets in my lifetime) and an incorrect result.  As much as I do regret getting those two tickets, I’m not particularly embarrassed by them.  But I am bothered by the incorrect component – one lists me as “guilty in absentia”  (for a ticket I got in Front Royal, doing 44 in a 30, I believe).  Now *this* bothers me greatly.  I may be morally corrupt enough to drive 44 in a 30, but I certainly do understand and meet my obligations to answer any resulting traffic summons.  And yet we’ve now got a publicly accessible resource which certainly makes it look as if I didn’t.  The NYT essay notes this problem of accuracy (and context):

A quick check of the database confirms that it is indeed imperfect. Some records are incomplete, and there is often no way to distinguish between people with the same names if you don’t know their birthdays (and even that date is often missing).

To further test the site, I vetted some of my colleagues at The New York Times. One, who shall remain nameless, had a recent tangle with the law that the site labeled a “criminal offense,” while adding no other information. Curious, I called my colleague with the date and city of the now very public ignominy. The person was stunned to know that the infraction — a speeding ticket — was easily accessible and described as criminal.

“I went to traffic school so this wouldn’t appear on my record. I’m in shock. This blows me away,” my colleague said, demanding that I ask PeopleFinders how to have the record removed. “I don’t necessarily want you all knowing that I’m a fast driver.”

The site’s owners remain unfazed:

PeopleFinders’ response: take it up with the authorities. When they update their records, the change will automatically appear on CriminalSearches.com.

So maybe the source of my particular problem is with the Virginia records themselves, and not CriminalSearches.  But it’s CriminalSearches that made it matter, because *anyone* can now pop my (rather uncommon) name in and see what comes up, without any contact with me.   The implications – legal, political, social – are worth considering.   Some of these concerns *were* considered, fairly recently:

In the past, Congress carefully considered how the public should use criminal records. Amendments to the Fair Credit Reporting Act in 1997 required that employers who hire investigators to obtain criminal records from consumer reporting agencies advise prospective employees of the search in advance, and disregard some types of convictions that are older than seven years.

“I don’t think Congress stuck that in there randomly,” says Daniel J. Solove, a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and author of “Understanding Privacy.” “Congress made the judgment that after a certain period of time, people shouldn’t be harmed by having convictions stick with them forever and ever.”

So, legally, some of the information you can find on individuals via CriminalSearches.com is off the table for certain uses.  But with such easy access, observance of these restrictions is doubtful:

Jurors can and almost certainly will be tempted to look up criminal pasts of defendants in their cases. And employers can conduct searches themselves without hiring investigators. Mr. Lane of PeopleFinders says that employers cannot legally use the database in making hiring decisions — but there is nothing to stop them.

And speaking of hiring decisions, let’s remember that even the Department of Justice – which we should expect to be as scrupulous an observer of the law as ever there was – used information it wasn’t legally entitled to use:

A recent investigation at the Justice Department demonstrates how once-obscure, now easily accessible public information can be abused in egregious ways. The investigative report by the department’s inspector general and internal ethics office said government lawyers mined sites like Tray.com and OpenSecrets.org, which report on individual political contributions, to discover political affiliations of job candidates.

The traditional walls that have kept information like political contributions, traffic offensive, and long-past criminal convictions from the casually curious have all but crumbled.  Maybe we should talk about privacy while we still remember it.