LexisNexis to Provide Giant Database of Personal Information to ICE

Much like your credit report, you're entitled to a free copy of your LexisNexis report. For most people it's at least an order of magnitude larger than your credit report. The hard copy that comes in the mail is a surprisingly large stack of paper. The number of errors in my report was almost comical. I was surprised to find out I own a 300,000 mixed use building in a trendy part of town with Class A office space. It also showed that I filed an insurance claim for hail damage on a house I was renting. Obviously it was the landlord who had the policy and handled the repairs.

I worked at LexisNexis Risk for years on the engineering side of the credit scoring, fraud detection, identity verification, etc. That was almost ten years ago, but I suspect the core value prop that LN offers here remains unchanged:

1. Buying like datasets and combining them into a single, national dataset, and

2. Linking those datasets together

The former is a challenge for anyone to do because you have data like property records that come from county assessors. Vehicle data - which is what seems to be relevant to this article - may be at the state level, which is easier than county, but it's still dealing with 50 states instead of one national registry.

The latter is important because connecting "JON SMITH" in one dataset with "JOHN SMITH" in another is a nontrivial problem that LN has addressed quite well by virtue of many different datasets.

There are (or at least were; with insurance data, this may be different) broadly two categories of data: FCRA-encumbered and non-FCRA data. FCRA data is more heavily restricted, and you're entitled to correct data that are wrong. As I recall, there are also legal limitations on who can use these data and for what reason. So my assumption is that not only is ICE buying this, but they also have to assert that they are legally allowed to do so. I'm not saying I'm cool with this contract, but in lieu of LN choosing to not to business with ICE, there's also the option that legislators could make it illegal for them to do this.

Public discourse really overindexed on social media companies selling data (not their biz model) and ignored LexisNexis, Axciom, and their ilk (is their biz model).

Not to say that the influence aspects of social media aren't worthy of scrutiny, but take like 40% of that scrutiny and throw it on data brokers if you are really care about privacy.

Yes, selling massive databases about other people is what their business is.

I used to be a lawyer. You had to attest your use case. It's not exactly the words on the tin, but "legal dispute" or "debt collection" were what I attested to. You could get a lot of historical data on a person.

ICE will have its own category that amounts to "we are ICE." Remember that federal law trumps state law where they conflict because of the supremacy clause of the Constitution. And I would be surprised if the restrictions on using these data don't have carveouts for "law enforcement purposes." Even if the carveouts are not in the legislation, there is a non-zero chance that the judges will invent one of whole cloth.

Mine own Lexis report was, of course, comically wrong. So I took it all with a grain of salt.