Faulty background checks are violating privacy and ruining lives

Criminal-record screening has become a pillar of life in the digital age. Employers, landlords and consumers have dozens of background-check companies to choose from to search for information about an individual. In addition to criminal history, many of these background reports provide information covering many areas of people’s lives, including home addresses, social media profiles, real estate transactions, voting records and family information.

Unfortunately, many companies fail to verify the quality or accuracy of the data they keep about us, providing incorrect or misleading information instead. These companies must be reined in to protect our privacy.

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. 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). 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.

This is a step in the right direction to regulate and monitor companies that peddle inaccurate and misleading information about millions of people. 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. But these companies have continued to profit from cheap and sloppy data aggregation by capitalizing on fear and mistrust to sell their reports.

As researchers, we have extensively studied the integrity of background screening. 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.

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. Altogether, 74 percent of the total criminal charges reported on our participants’ reports did not have matches on the official state reports. 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.

As 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. After an extensive review of various governmental records, we discovered he had an alias listed on an old court record. 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.

Anyone who searched for our participant using this company would get the misleading impression he had a lengthy rap sheet. 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.

The people in our study described losing job opportunities and apartments because of faulty background checks. 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. Some described how their neighbors avoided them after an old mugshot was published on one of these websites. 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.

Our research illustrates the problem with unregulated background checks: they regularly contain errors, are misleading and are unreliable. Yet they are widely available for anyone on the internet. 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.

This is where federal law can help. 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. This kind of protection must be applied to our current era of digitization and aggregation of personal information.

Unfortunately, the FCRA is decades old and was developed prior to the digital age. The law has struggled to keep up. People-search companies like Instant Checkmate and TruthFinder have evaded oversight for years by claiming to be tech companies rather than background-screening companies. The FTC has finally called their bluff, but we hope this is just the beginning.

We urge the FTC to aggressively apply this law to people-search websites that aggregate public information without any accuracy verification, quality control measures or clear options for people to have their information immediately removed. These companies sell our personal information to anyone willing to pay, including those who will use the information to stalk, harass or dox people. It is time to let us gain control over our personal data.

Sarah Esther Lageson is an associate professor at the Rutgers University-Newark School of Criminal Justice and the author of “Digital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma, and the Harms of Data-Driven Criminal Justice.” Robert Stewart is an assistant professor of criminology at the University of Maryland and former Director of Research at the Minnesota Justice Research Center.