Posted on 11/12/2006 2:32:28 PM PST by neverdem
IF you found yourself running a company suddenly branded one of the most reviled in the country — if, for example, you noticed that visitors to Consumerist.com, a heavily visited consumer Web site, voted yours as the second “worst company in America” and you had just been awarded the 2005 “Lifetime Menace Award” by the human rights group Privacy International — you might feel obliged to take extraordinary steps. You might even want to reach out to your most vocal critics and ask them, “What are we doing wrong?”
So it was in early 2005 that Douglas C. Curling, the president of ChoicePoint, a giant data broker that maintains digital dossiers on nearly every adult in the United States, courted two critics whom he had accused just months earlier of starting “yet another inaccurate, misdirected and misleading attack” on his company.
Mr. Curling also contacted others who had spent years calling for laws requiring better safeguarding of personal information that ChoicePoint and other data brokers assemble — records such as Social Security numbers, birth dates, driver’s license numbers, license plate numbers, spouse names, maiden names, addresses, criminal records, civil judgments and the purchase price of every parcel of property a person has ever owned.
“It was sort of like when I talk with my wife when she’s not happy with me,” Mr. Curling said of his dealings with some of ChoicePoint’s harshest critics. “It’s not exactly a dialogue I look forward to, but I can’t deny it’s important.”
--snip--
“ChoicePoint, to its credit, got right behind our legislation and lobbied for it,” Senator Schumer said. But the bill, which he and Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, introduced in April 2005, has not passed, he said, “because a lot of other companies, quietly and behind the scenes, killed it.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.