Security vs. Privacy: Unpacking L.A. County's Criminal Record Search Changes
March 7, 2024
Privacy Plus+
Privacy, Technology and Perspective
This week, let’s look at the serious, unintended consequences of the Los Angeles County Superior Court’s recent decision to remove month- and year-of-birth information from its criminal-record search engines.
An Abrupt Change:
On February 23d, the Superior Court of Los Angeles announced that it “will no longer include the month and year of birth as criteria in its criminal name search engines.”
You can read the entire (two sentence) order here:
Why This Matters:
Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), 15 U.S.C. §§ 1681-1681x, background checks must be conducted with the highest possible accuracy. False negatives (where a person who has committed a serious, relevant, recent crime are not identified) are risky for a prospective employer, but false positives -- where available information show criminal-record “matches” to people who had nothing to do with it! -- harm everyone involved: applicants wanting to start new jobs, and prospective employers alike.
Many people share the same name; even more share nicknames. Often, dates of birth can quickly, definitively confirm or disprove apparent “matches” from names, nicknames and other identifiers. (Dates, months and years of birth are not foolproof, because it’s surprising how many people share the same name and the same birthday. But they are often very effective in helping turn around accurate reports lawfully and quickly.)
Los Angeles County is the most populous county in the USA. Without corresponding birth month/year information, conscientious background researchers will now have to research each return that shows a possible criminal-record “match” to try and find some other way to confirm that it is, or is not, a true match.
Expect:
Longer delays in background checks, higher costs, greater anxiety, and perhaps ugly surprises, exasperating confusion, and mistakes.
The Source of This:
This issue arose in the case of All of Us or None of Us v. Hamrick, a California Court of Appeals case from 2021. Relying on California rules, the court held that date-of-birth and driver’s license numbers could not be included in publicly available criminal-record databases. The California legislature passed a statute to correct this, but the Governor vetoed the bill on privacy grounds.
You can read the court’s opinion at the following link:
Our Thoughts
We fully appreciate the importance of keeping much personally-identifiable information private. But our sympathies here are with:
(1) job-seekers who have common names. They will now find it harder and harder to disprove that they have meaningful criminal records;
(2) employers seeking to hire. They now face increased complexity, delay, uncertainty, and cost;
(3) consumer reporting agencies, whose tasks are now greatly complicated.
For more information on the Los Angeles decision, here is a useful article:
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Hosch & Morris, PLLC is a boutique law firm dedicated to data privacy and protection, cybersecurity, the Internet and technology. Open the Future℠.