Unfortunately, the FCRA is decades old and was developed prior to the digital age. This kind of protection must be applied to our current era of digitization and aggregation of personal information. For instance, the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires the requester of the report to do so with a valid purpose and requires the subject of the report to be notified. When an Instant Checkmate or TruthFinder report contains inaccurate or misleading information, but the company fails to respond to complaints about accuracy or ensure the reports are being used for legitimate reasons, there are consequences for people’s social, personal and professional lives. Yet they are widely available for anyone on the internet. Our research illustrates the problem with unregulated background checks: they regularly contain errors, are misleading and are unreliable. Many opted to stop volunteering at church or at their children’s schools because they were unsure what might come up on a background check, even if they had no criminal convictions. Some described how their neighbors avoided them after an old mugshot was published on one of these websites. Participants told us how they were suddenly blocked from working for or using gig-economy apps because an inaccurate or out-of-date background check popped up. The people in our study described losing job opportunities and apartments because of faulty background checks. But, unlike FCRA-compliant companies, these people-search services provide little or no effective path to dispute or have these inaccurate charges removed, as the FTC has documented. Another man with a criminal record had used a similar alias at some point, and the people-search company’s matching algorithm apparently linked this man’s record to our participant.Īnyone who searched for our participant using this company would get the misleading impression he had a lengthy rap sheet. After an extensive review of various governmental records, we discovered he had an alias listed on an old court record. These inaccurately reported charges are the likely result of low-quality data aggregation techniques where criminal charges against people with similar names and birthdates are erroneously lumped together.Īs an especially egregious example, the background report for one participant - who had two drug convictions from over 30 years ago on his official record - erroneously attributed over 50 charges to him, including aggravated assault, robbery, failure to register, gun possession and child abuse. Altogether, 74 percent of the total criminal charges reported on our participants’ reports did not have matches on the official state reports. Our forthcoming paper in the peer-reviewed journal Criminology shows that for the 101 people in our study, every single participant had at least one error on the criminal record information provided in their background report. To gauge how accurate these reports are, we recently compared official, fingerprint-based governmental rap sheets to fee-based reports from a “people search” company like TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate. But these companies have continued to profit from cheap and sloppy data aggregation by capitalizing on fear and mistrust to sell their reports.Īs researchers, we have extensively studied the integrity of background screening. Faulty background reports have extensive ripple effects, causing people to lose jobs, apartments or other opportunities, and creating unjustified or unending public shaming and stigma. This is a step in the right direction to regulate and monitor companies that peddle inaccurate and misleading information about millions of people. According to the FTC, these unregulated “ people search” companies violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a federal law regulating the dissemination of consumer information to ensure the accuracy of background checks and credit reports. You’ve likely encountered ads from these companies, which often show up in searches enticing consumers with the promise to learn “the truth” about anyone (for a fee). The FTC announced earlier this month that it will require two background-check websites, TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate, to pay $5.8 million in fines to settle charges of, among other things, “failing to ensure the maximum possible accuracy” of their reports.
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