Choicepoint
ChoicePoint
Executive Summary
The data broker industry has contributed positively to many aspects in our communities.
From one end it helped in assessing different types of businesses in managing and evaluating risks, detecting possible frauds, lowering the risk of costly hiring mistakes, provide information services to law enforcements helping locating missing children and identifying suspects, and many others. These contributions managed to benefit different stakeholders in a lot of fields such as government agencies, financial sectors, educational institutions, small businesses and many other individual clients.
Despite these benefits the data broker industry in general and ChoicePoint in specific is still facing too many critics and challenges such as: (a) dealing with the privacy of the data gathered about American citizens; (b) ensuring the accuracy of the data provided by public and private sources; and (c) developing the right methods in selecting clients and ensuring correct usage of data provided to those clients. Failing in overseeing and these challenges might lead to many serious consequences in the short and long term on ChoicePoint, the clients, and the public. ChoicePoint for example was facing several lawsuits and started to be questioned about its credibility and reliability. Moreover, some illegitimate clients took advantage of the poor screening and selection methods that are performed by ChoicePoint and managed to acquire critical data that led to many identity theft cases. More importantly, these problems and challenges affected the American citizen in jeopardizing their data privacy by hackers and criminals in addition to some misrepresentation of their information to many stakeholders such as government agencies and financial institutions.
In order to overcome these challenges, ChoicePoint should meet its commitments and duties in all phases of the life cycle of the personal-data industry: gathering data,
Executive Summary
The data broker industry has contributed positively to many aspects in our communities.
From one end it helped in assessing different types of businesses in managing and evaluating risks, detecting possible frauds, lowering the risk of costly hiring mistakes, provide information services to law enforcements helping locating missing children and identifying suspects, and many others. These contributions managed to benefit different stakeholders in a lot of fields such as government agencies, financial sectors, educational institutions, small businesses and many other individual clients.
Despite these benefits the data broker industry in general and ChoicePoint in specific is still facing too many critics and challenges such as: (a) dealing with the privacy of the data gathered about American citizens; (b) ensuring the accuracy of the data provided by public and private sources; and (c) developing the right methods in selecting clients and ensuring correct usage of data provided to those clients. Failing in overseeing and these challenges might lead to many serious consequences in the short and long term on ChoicePoint, the clients, and the public. ChoicePoint for example was facing several lawsuits and started to be questioned about its credibility and reliability. Moreover, some illegitimate clients took advantage of the poor screening and selection methods that are performed by ChoicePoint and managed to acquire critical data that led to many identity theft cases. More importantly, these problems and challenges affected the American citizen in jeopardizing their data privacy by hackers and criminals in addition to some misrepresentation of their information to many stakeholders such as government agencies and financial institutions.
In order to overcome these challenges, ChoicePoint should meet its commitments and duties in all phases of the life cycle of the personal-data industry: gathering data,