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Comment by _delirium | Hacker News Reader

Maybe a completely naive question: Insurance companies seem to be one of the main entities interested in tracking such people down, and are pretty big, regulated companies. Meanwhile, some of the "unlicensed investigators" interviewed in the article openly admit to doing illegal things in their investigations, like obtaining phone records by impersonating phone company employees. Seems a bit brazen. Are there enough intermediaries to somehow give the big companies plausible deniability? Or do police just not care to crack down on this arrangement?

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  Are there enough intermediaries
  to somehow give the big companies
  plausible deniability?

In the News International phone hacking scandal [1] the likes of Rebekah Brooks shredded a bunch of documents as investigators were closing in, then claimed they had no idea how their journalists had found all those otherwise-inexplicable scoops. As a punishment she was.... paid £10 million to resign, then hired back 4 years later.

Using intermediaries for deniability works, simple as that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...

As a guess: There's probably a lot of gray zone.

When I worked in insurance, our HIPAA training indicated we could call a doctor and ask questions and pay the claim based on information obtained by phone. But we could also be told we needed to send a written request and HIPAA compliant authorization.

For that and other reasons, I suspect jobs like private investigator exist precisely because they don't have to comply with the same rules as, say, the police.

Reading further:

Frank Ahearn is ....a skip tracer (i.e., unlicensed investigator) who has worked to find missing people when a private investigator can’t do so legally.

You don’t have to explain how you found someone. They can’t get one of your steps declared inadmissible and then have a second chance at running. I don’t see how the police would know, unless the phone company detected and reported it.

You do sometimes see news stories about police officers getting caught selling DMV database queries to PIs.

You even see stories about those officers going to jail, there was a pretty prominent case in the UK.

How much privacy rights do dead people have?

Dead people have basically no rights, at least in the United States.

Actually:

> The HIPAA Privacy Rule protects the individually identifiable health information about a decedent for 50 years following the date of death of the individual.

https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance...

Given they hire them as a consultant or contractor, I'm sure there's plenty of plausible deniability on their end.

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