Information Brokers ChoicePoint Under Scrutiny

The data-collecting company has managed to avoid being bogged down by regulations -- until maybe now. ChoicePoint Inc. was created to avoid just the sort of mess in which it now finds itself. The nation's biggest private collector of personal information was spun off seven years ago from credit bureau Equifax Inc. largely to get around laws restricting the way such bureaus sell data. Because it was not considered a financial services company, ChoicePoint was not subject to data laws, and for years the plan worked like a charm. Freed from regulation, the company saw sales more than double -- and its profit and stock price more than quadruple -- as businesses demanded more data to manage risks and target marketing. ChoicePoint became the quintessential Information Age company, culling all manner of sensitive facts and figures about virtually every adult in the United States, some 19 billion records in all. But in the wake of a security breach that allowed a ring of identity thieves to peruse tens of thousands of those records, ChoicePoint suddenly faces the sort of government oversight that it and similar companies have sought to avoid. The Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulators are investigating ChoicePoint's practices. Last week, the Senate Banking Committee held the first in a series of congressional hearings. Legislators and industry experts predict new regulation of ChoicePoint and competing information brokers that compile and sell Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers and financial histories to tens of thousands of customers, including lenders, landlords and many of the Fortune 500.

SAME Company that Created the Flawed Florida Felon Voter List - Wrongly Preventing Blacks from Voting in 2000 Election
ElectionChoicePoint bought Santa Ana-based CDB Infotek in 1996, shortly before spinning off from Equifax, and added Database Technologies Inc. in 2000. The next year, Database Technologies came under fire for having given Florida election officials a list of thousands of suspected felons that state officials used to bar people from voting. The list was riddled with errors, and many of the accused were black Democrats. At least 1,000 people were improperly kept from voting, more than George W. Bush's margin of victory. The NAACP sued. ChoicePoint blamed Florida officials for asking for near-matches without making confirmation checks on their own. ChoicePoint settled the case in 2002 and agreed to reprocess its list of suspected ex-cons. Los Angeles Times March 13, 2005