J'accuse
The New York Times had an article yesterday pointing out that it's impossible to expunge a criminal record these days. The situation: Many people who commit minor crimes are offered expungement by the judge if they behave--complete erasure of their record. The problem: Database companies like Choicepoint and Acxiom hoover up the information as soon as it hits the computer, retaining the data regardless of whether or not it stays in the public computers.
It's actually worse than the article indicates. Often people who have been accused of a crime and later acquitted are also in the databases and are unable to clean it up.
It's impossible to clean these records because they're too widely distributed. Unlike credit reports, where there's essentially three major bureaus, there are many American database companies. Additionally once their customers have bought data, it's out of their hands. One of the biggest customers these days is of course, the federal government. This puts the government in the unique position of being able to circuituously read back in data that they generated in the first place and retain it in a way that they couldn't legally do if they had just kept it.
Posted on October 18, 2006
