{"id":1081,"date":"2008-08-03T10:37:34","date_gmt":"2008-08-03T14:37:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/?p=1081"},"modified":"2008-08-21T17:40:44","modified_gmt":"2008-08-21T21:40:44","slug":"you-did-what-searching-criminal-records-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/2008\/08\/03\/you-did-what-searching-criminal-records-online\/","title":{"rendered":"You Did *What*? Searching “Criminal” Records Online"},"content":{"rendered":"

This NYTimes is carrying an interesting essay<\/a> 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).\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 The author explains:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Go ahead, you can search me.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 As much as I do regret getting those two tickets, I’m not particularly embarrassed by them.\u00c2\u00a0 But I am<\/em> bothered by the incorrect component – one lists me as “guilty in absentia”\u00c2\u00a0 (for a ticket I got in Front Royal, doing 44 in a 30, I believe).\u00c2\u00a0 Now *this* bothers me greatly.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 And yet we’ve now got a publicly accessible resource which certainly makes it look as if I didn’t.\u00c2\u00a0 The NYT essay notes this problem of accuracy (and context):<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know their birthdays (and even that date is often missing).<\/p>\n

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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153criminal offense,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d a speeding ticket \u00e2\u20ac\u201d was easily accessible and described as criminal.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I went to traffic school so this wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t appear on my record. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m in shock. This blows me away,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d my colleague said, demanding that I ask PeopleFinders how to have the record removed. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t necessarily want you all knowing that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a fast driver.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The site’s owners remain unfazed:<\/p>\n

PeopleFinders\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 response: take it up with the authorities. When they update their records, the change will automatically appear on CriminalSearches.com.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So maybe the source of my particular problem is with the Virginia records themselves, and not CriminalSearches.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 The implications – legal, political, social – are worth considering.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Some of these concerns *were* considered, fairly recently:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think Congress stuck that in there randomly,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Daniel J. Solove, a professor of law at the George Washington University<\/a> Law School and author of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Understanding Privacy.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Congress made the judgment that after a certain period of time, people shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be harmed by having convictions stick with them forever and ever.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, legally, some of the information you can find on individuals via CriminalSearches.com is off the table for certain uses.\u00c2\u00a0 But with such easy access, observance of these restrictions is doubtful:<\/p>\n

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 \u00e2\u20ac\u201d but there is nothing to stop them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s inspector general and internal ethics office said government lawyers mined sites like Tray.com<\/a> and OpenSecrets.org<\/a>, which report on individual political contributions, to discover political affiliations of job candidates.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe we should talk about privacy while we still remember it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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).\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 The author explains: Last month, PeopleFinders, a 20-year-old company based in Sacramento, introduced CriminalSearches.com, a free service to satisfy those common […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-policy","category-society"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1081\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}