Choicepoint: they're everywhere they want to be

[katty]

excerpt/more: http://www.epic.org/privacy/choicepoint/

At Privacy International's Big Brother Award ceremony held in Cambridge, MA on March 7, 2001, ChoicePoint received the "Greatest Corporate Invader" award "for massive selling of records, accurate and inaccurate to cops, direct marketers and election officials." At Privacy International's Big Brother Award ceremony held in Seattle, Washington in April 2005, ChoicePoint received the "Lifetime Menace Award" for its continued efforts to build dossiers on individuals.

ChoicePoint, a profiling company. ChoicePoint operates a number of websites devoted to law enforcement access to personal information, including ChoicePoint Online for the FBI, ChoicePoint Online for the INS, ChoicePoint Online for HUD, and ChoicePoint Online for the Government.

Security and Exchange Commission Information on ChoicePoint.
ChoicePoint's Big Brother Award, Privacy International, 2001.
FBI's Reliance on the Private Sector Has Raised Some Privacy Concerns, Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2001 (subscription required).
FBI turns to private sector for data, MSNBC.com (WSJ), April 13, 2001.
How ChoicePoint serves up your personal info to the FBI, Declan McCullagh's politechbot.com, April 13, 2001.

FTC Investigation of Choicepoint

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is conducting an investigation of Choicepoint and other commercial data brokers, in part based on a complaint that EPIC filed at the agency in December 2004. In that complaint, Chris Jay Hoofnagle and Daniel J. Solove urged the agency to investigate the compilation and sale of personal dossiers by data brokers such as ChoicePoint. EPIC argued that the dossiers may constitute "consumer reports" for purposes of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, thus subjecting both the information seller and the buyer to regulation under the Act. Furthermore, EPIC argued that it is incumbent upon the Commission to analyze whether the sale of these dossiers circumvents the Act, giving businesses, private investigators, and law enforcement access to data that previously had been subjected to Fair Information Practices.

Some dossier products, such as the company's AutoTrackXP report, are sold without complying with the substantive and procedural protections in the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a 1970 law that broadly regulates the compilation, use, and dissemination of "consumer reports."

AutoTrackXP reports contain Social Security Numbers; driver license numbers; address history; phone numbers; property ownership and transfer records; vehicle, boat, and plane registrations; Uniform Commercial Code filings; financial information such as bankruptcies, liens, and judgments; professional licenses; business affiliations; "other people who have used the same address of the subject," "possible licensed drivers at the subject's address," and information about the data subject's relatives and neighbors. They are similar in scope and in use to standard credit reports normally protected by the Act. By selling them without the Act's protections, ChoicePoint is subverting the policy goals of federal information privacy law.

EPIC argued that companies like ChoicePoint are returning people to a pre-Fair Credit Reporting Act era, one marked by "unaccountable data companies that reported inaccurate, falsified, and irrelevant information on Americans, sometimes deliberately to drive up the prices of insurance or credit.

Later in December 2004, Choicepoint answered the EPIC letter, disputed charges, and called for a national debate. EPIC responded by challenging the company to a public debate.

In February 2005, EPIC supplemented the Choicepoint complaint. The supplemental letter raises three additional issues relevant to the rise of commercial data brokers. First, an article written by Robert O'Harrow Jr. of the Washington Post quoted Choicepoint representatives saying that the company acts like an "intelligence agency" and that the data industry should be subject to new regulations because of how personal information is being used. O'Harrow's article demonstrated the reliance on commercial data brokers for decision-making, and the growing importance that the brokers' data be accurate and their
practices accountable to the public.

Second, the letter included a dialogue from Declan McCullagh's Politechbot.com mailing list concerning the December 2004 complaint. A list message from a private investigator who uses Choicepoint noted that the company maintains an audit trail of clients who access personal information. The EPIC letter points out that law enforcement users are not subject to the audit trails, and that EPIC is unaware of a single case where a commercial data broker has turned in a user for prosecution as a result of an audit showing prohibited use of the service.

Last, the letter included a transcript of a recent television broadcast, "Someone's Watching," that aired on Dec. 18, 2004, on the Discovery Times Channel. The broadcast shows two private investigators using a commercial data broker to access a stranger's Social Security Number, employment details, and other information without any legal justification.