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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

This kind of company deserves to die, and the public record laws for highly personal data also. The obsession with "background checks" is a really huge part of why the US has extremely high recidivism rate.

When people can't find a job even flipping burgers or distributing newspapers, they have no choice other than to go back to the criminal life.

edit: as I got private feedback: it is not my intention to disrespect people flipping burgers or doing other "low level" jobs. My post was meant to illustrate that these two jobs usually do not require education and especially not a "background check", so it is entirely pointless to do these (or to not hire people with a... shady past).

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A few people I've known with criminal histories only managed to turn their lives around by scraping a business together for themselves, going into home contracting (handyman, exterminator, etc.). They had done time for stuff like narcotics trafficking and manslaughter and were never going to be hired by any employer otherwise.

Then, in the vein of technological progress, services started popping up encouraging potential clients to do background checks on contractors. You wouldn't want to let a former criminal into your home to do repairs, after all.

I don't know how they're making it these days.

> Then, in the vein of technological progress, services started popping up encouraging potential clients to do background checks on contractors. You wouldn't want to let a former criminal into your home to do repairs, after all.

How in f..ks name is this even legal, to begin with?

At some point some enterprising youts figured out how to scrape public records databases and re-sell the information. It's hardly illegal.

It only got into illegal(ish) territory when they started gaming SEO to shame individuals with criminal records (so your mugshot was the first thing that came up on searches), charging money to de-prioritize those results, and not necessarily following through.

It is legal because court records are public information.

I'm curious how much "Ban the Box" laws apply to contractors and gig economy workers, my guess is not at all.

I 95% agree with you. We have a huge problem in the US with recidivism and once someone has paid their debt to society, their past shouldn't be held against them.

However, Checkr is the result of a strong demand for this type of service, not the cause of it. If Checkr didn't exist then companies would use someone else to conduct their background checks.

Sadly, I don't think we'll see a change in this mentality & practice until there is legislation against it. Background checks are just too easy of a way to filter applicants (from an effort perspective), especially for minimum-wage/high turnover jobs.

Also, just to play devil's advocate - would you get into an Uber if you knew the driver had 5 previous DUIs? What happens if/when this person drives drunk again and kills a passenger or a pedestrian?

The ethical decision becomes more nuanced, Uber has a responsibility to do everything it can to ensure the safety of its passengers. You have to draw a line somewhere.

> would you get into an Uber if you knew the driver had 5 previous DUIs?

Well they somehow convinced the state they should have a driver's license still. If they're that dangerous they shouldn't be on the road.

Further, simply having 5 DUIs on record is itself not a sufficient data point to determine if there is any increased risk today of that person doing so again. For instance, if a person turned to drinking out of grief at one point in their life but has had many stable years since, how would you identify that risk against the risk of someone who hasn't yet lived through such a situation but were it to occur they would drink to excess and make poor decisions too?

NOTE:

I'm not saying those DUIs aren't a problem, I'm just pointing out that it can be more complicated than it first appears to reach an internally consistent, much less fair, approach.

> would you get into an Uber if you knew the driver had 5 previous DUIs?

Yes, unless they smelled of alcohol, but at that point the DUIs are moot anyway.

Why would you get into a car with that driver? Out of the total population of licensed drivers in the United States[1], about 1% have DWI in any given year and the recidivism rate is upwards of 20% depending on the state[2][3]. Given available statistics about the relationship between alcohol consumption and likelihood of a vehicular accident[4], there's good evidence that you're increasing your risk of being in an accident by at least 60% if you get into a car with someone who has had a DWI.

Further, considering recidivism can only be tracked if people are caught and the legal limit is 0.08 BAC, a good argument can be made that an Uber driver with a past DWI would be more likely than can be predicted to have be driving under the influence again (meanwhile a BAC of 0.05 still increases the risk of an accident by approximately 100%).

_____________________

1. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/hf/pl11028/c...

2. https://one.nhtsa.gov/people/outreach/traftech/1995/tt085.ht...

3. https://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/nti/pdf/811991-DWI_Recidiv...

4. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/09/how-j...

> just to play devil's advocate - would you get into an Uber if you knew the driver had 5 previous DUIs?

See, this is the very problem with using criminal history as a form of profiling.

What about his history indicates that he drinks on the job, or will be drunk when you get into his car? If those DUIs all occurred off-the-clock, involving no passengers or collisions, after long shifts of driving stone sober, what's it to Uber?

The irony is, if we deny him employment opportunities based on past behavior unrelated to his job performance, he's going to have plenty of free time to indulge such vices. Being unemployed sucks.

Meanwhile take a 20-something with a habit of getting high behind the wheel. He's still young so he's got a clean record and few (if any) reviews. You'd get into his deathmobile simply because you don't know any better.

Point is, there are lots of options as an employer. Might as well pick the one without a criminal record, all else being equal. And just imagine the lawsuit when someone sues you because of an accident and you hired the driver even though he had 5 DUIs.

To be fair, the CEO of Checkr advocates strongly that a service like Checkr is one way to combat this exact problem.

Traditional background checks are very blunt tools, where decisions are very binary. If an individual is a felon, there is typically zero room for negotiation. This is often the case even with just a misdemeanor. There is usually very little trusted, low cost, easily accessed data, which can balance out or provide a more nuanced view. A service like Checkr is able to provide a much more comprehensive picture, with more depth and nuance, so that employers can be more discerning and less binary.

Also, it's not as if applications don't already specifically ask for information on criminal record. The standard is that employer has this information, without doing any actual background checks. I imagine a comprehensive background checking service would mostly serve to incentivize an employer to hire a subset of previously convicted individuals that they otherwise wouldn't have, and not the other way around.

I work with hospitals and receive access to incredibly private information, as well as access to and knowledge of pharmacy data for highly controlled substances. Some of the hospitals I work with are research institutions, whose researchers are subject to death threats on a regular basis.

I find it perfectly reasonable that they would want a third-party verification of my legal history, drug use, and financial situation.

Well look at you

I used to work for a video streaming site. They did background checks as a blanket policy for all employees. Personally, I disagree with that position. However, the team I worked for ran the subscriber management system, meaning we basically “ran the till”. For something like that, I think a credit monitoring service is appropriate. But for the rest of the team? It’s a waste and intrusive, and, as others point out, makes it hard for people with a record to reintegrate into society.

I don’t agree with blanket policies. Policies should be tailored to risks associated with the situation. Some jobs need it, most don’t.

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