Reply #50: CDB Infotek- Subsidiary of Choicepoint

[Clara T]

Early in the year, the company, ChoicePoint, gave Florida officials a list with the names of 8,000 ex-felons to "scrub" from their list of voters. But it turns out none on the list were guilty of felonies, only misdemeanors. The company acknowledged the error, and blamed it on the original source of the list -- the state of Texas.

Florida officials moved to put those falsely accused by Texas back on voter rolls before the election. Nevertheless, the large number of errors uncovered in individual counties suggests that thousands of eligible voters may have been turned away at the polls.

Florida is the only state that pays a private company that promises to "cleanse" voter rolls.The state signed in 1998 a $4 million contract with DBT Online, since merged into ChoicePoint, of Atlanta. The creation of the scrub list, called the central voter file, was mandated by a 1998 state voter fraud law, which followed a tumultuous year that saw Miami's mayor removed after voter fraud in the election, with dead people discovered to have cast ballots. The voter fraud law required all 67 counties to purge voter registries of duplicate registrations, deceased voters and felons, many of whom, but not all, are barred from voting in Florida.

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Especially if that president is named "Bush." ChoicePoint's board and executive roster are packed with Republican stars, including billionaire Ken Langone, a company director who was chairman of the fund-raising committee for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's aborted run against Hillary Rodham Clinton. Langone is joined at ChoicePoint by another Giuliani associate, former New York Police Commissioner Howard Safir. And Republican power lobbyist and former congressman Vin Weber lobbies for ChoicePoint in Washington. Just before his death in 1998, Rick Rozar, president of a Choicepoint company, CDB Infotek, donated $100,000 to the Republican Party.

http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/12/04/voter_file/print.html


CDB Infotek, based in Santa Ana, California, is the nation's leading provider of public record information. As a member of the information industry, CDB Infotek is a business-to-business provider of public record information products. The company was founded in 1979 as a licensed private investigative firm but discontinued offering these services in 1991 to focus on providing on-line public record information to the business community. In 1996, a majority interest in CDB Infotek was obtained by ChoicePoint, formerly the Insurance Services Group within Equifax, and today the nation's leading provider of personal information for insurance and risk management decisions. CDB Infotek provides access to its public record information products to selected organizations with legitimate business purposes in the following sectors.
Federal government. Federal agencies that subscribe to CDB Infotek include the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, the Health Care Financing Administration, the Department of Justice and many others.
 
State governments. CDB Infotek provides products and services to law enforcement, taxation and a wide variety of other agencies in many states.
 
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/privacy/wkshp97/comments1/cdbinfot.htm

Formal Complaint


Subject: Unethical Use of Consumer Data for Reference Services/Look-ups

Companies: CDB Infotek ; Unidentified Publishers and List Compilers

Dear Ethics Committee Member:

It is a fundamental principle of the DMA that consumer data should only be used for marketing purposes.
I am hereby filing a formal complaint against CDB Infotek for using consumer data to provide reference services (e.g., skip tracing, bill collection, look-ups, people-locating). This complaint also is filed against all magazines, publishers, consumer mailing list compilers, and other compilers of consumer data who have provided CDB with consumer data for such purposes.

A summary of the applicable DMA standards is appended as Exhibit 1 for the benefit and convenience of all interested parties.

Facts

CDB/Equifax

CDB Infotek of Santa Ana, California, is a subsidiary of Equifax, Inc. According to its promotional materials, CDB offers consumer data on-line for reference purposes.

A sampling of CDB's materials and web site pages from 1993-present shows CDB offering data from "publishers' lists", "mailing lists", and "consumer files ".

As of last month, CDB was offering a "Skip Tracing Tool" called "National Publisher's Change of Address." This is currently described on CDB's web site as containing "new address information on individuals based on changes of address filed with various magazine and publishing companies".

According to a 1996 marketing pamphlet, CDB's "Missing Links" look-up service has utilized publishers' mailing records to obtain unlisted phone numbers, as well as age, address updates, wealth ratings, median income, and information on up to thirty neighbors.

http://www.epic.org/privacy/junk_mail/richardson.html