Chocolate Cubed

This morning, while reading the NY Times, I came across two articles that are somewhat related and started me thinking.  The first is titled “If You Run a Red Light, Will Everyone Know?” by Brad Stone.  In this essay Stone informs his readers about a site that was just unveiled last month: CriminalSearches.com. The site is owned by PeopleFinders and allows anyone to search public criminal records about anyone else.  All you need to know about the person is their first and last name.  This means you can look me up by just entering Jordan Salvit in the search and can see that I have no criminal offenses to my name.  As Stone points out in his blog post, “Is ChoicePoint a Model of Restraint in Releasing Criminal Records?“, people can easily judge their peers with access to this potentially incomplete information.  In his essay, Stone notes that if you have the records corrected they will be fixed immediately on the site.  So if you had a traffic violation removed from your record in Virginia it will no longer appear on CriminalSearches.com.  The problem is that nothing ever gets deleted from the internet.  Once content is posted on a site and then crawled by Google and cached in their system or by Archive.org someone can always find it.  After finishing the essay the privacy advocate in me was screaming to shut this site down.   Read the rest of this entry »