Has ChoicePoint Turned The Corner?

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the fool-me-once... dept

When we recently had a post that talked about someone being accidentally arrested due to a mistake in ChoicePoint’s database, an anonymous employee of ChoicePoint showed up in the comments to defend the company and claim that they had made big changes (s/he also noted that s/he was a recent employee of the company). That same ChoicePoint employee has submitted a story from the NY Times about how the company has changed since its name became synonymous with giving your personal data to identity thieves and having pretty bad quality control on the data they have about you anyway. The article is interesting from a few different angles. First, and perhaps most importantly, the company does seem to have realized that it had a pretty serious problem on its hands. Rather than stonewalling and pretending nothing was wrong (like many, many companies would), it did agree to confront the problems head on — specifically trying to start a conversation with its harshest critics to ask them what they should do to fix things. This, actually, is a very smart and very commendable move that many other organizations (Diebold, anyone? the RIAA?) could learn an awful lot from. It serves multiple purposes: it takes the criticisms seriously and then (if the company follows through) gets its largest critics to admit that the company was making changes. Of course, it’s that second part that is the more important part.

While ChoicePoint has convinced many of its critics that it’s improved, some are still skeptical — and, of course, the company talked about how secure its systems were a few years back before everyone found out they weren’t. It’s good to hear that the company has taken the criticism and problems seriously — but that doesn’t mean everyone just rolls over and assumes they’ve fixed all the problems. The article doesn’t do much to address the issue of incorrect data (which the very same paper, the NY Times, showed was still a big problem for ChoicePoint less than a month ago). Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle blasted ChoicePoint for appointing former in-house counsel to the newly appointed position of “customer advocate,” rather than actually hiring someone who, say, had some experience in consumer affairs (and also for having her role be in the marketing department, rather than reporting directly to the CEO). So, yes, it’s great to see the company accept that it’s made a lot of mistakes and clearly they’re trying to fix them, but there are still plenty of issues to be addressed.