> saying it would be unethical to only use Forewarn’s data to determine whom to work with. As part of her job, Hicks is responsible for ensuring the realtors she manages are as financially successful as possible.
So discrimination is ok because you know, we have to make as much money as possible
> “The real estate agent can essentially screen out people they don't want by saying, ‘Oh, this person drives a Ford truck and I only want to sell to high end people so I'm just gonna get rid of this customer'”
This type of stuff is a prime example of our laws lagging behind technology. All these companies that hoover up personal information and sell it on the gray market should be regulated out of existence. Does the EU stand for this type of thing?
It really seams like there is a law already on the books that applies to this company, they are just claiming the reports they provide about consumers are not "consumer reports" and thus the Fair Credit Reporting Act doesn't apply.
I filed a complaint with the CFPB and the FTC against the commercial entities mentioned in this piece. I suggest you do the same. That’s what regulators are for.
Edit: wouldn’t hurt to file a complaint with your state’s attorney general as well. Always Be Establishing A Papertrail.
The writeup said this is all public information, even if personal. Do we really want government bureaucrats being the only ones with access to your conviction records??
It reminds me of the experiment where people are shown a girl with purple hair holding a feminist sign and then asked which statement is more likely to be true; either (A) the girl works at a bank or (B) the girl works at a bank and is a feminist. Most people felt that statement B was more likely to be true but that is mathematically impossible.
This seems similar: "Do you want only the government doing that bad thing?" Our knee-jerk reaction is "no".
> Do we really want government bureaucrats being the only ones with access to your conviction records??
I sense a tone of sarcastic incredulity in this question but... yes? If you want to run background checks on people that's one thing, but A) it should cost money if for no other reason than to stop people scraping other's information for no reason, B) it should only be accessible if you can provide a justification for why you need that information, like you're trying to hire someone for a job or something.
Like in a minority of cases, for example the sex offender registry[1] comes to mind, I can understand why the public has an interest in having that information be readily available. For your average Joe Blow with a parking ticket or who stole a beer once? If he's done his time, leave him be.
1: Of course that system has all kinds of it's own issues but that's another conversation.
Me too, but sometimes the government sells data to companies and data brokers. Thats why I had to de-register from voting. They were handing my residential address to third parties. I also detest any KYC that insists on a residential address. SSN and a passport number should be more than enough to know who I am. USPS and DMV are also culprits. Never file a CoA with the USPS. They just hand out your new address to companies if you do.
The current reality is a superset of (a)+(b)+(c). It also includes (d): Any individual with sufficient money has even more info on you than any single large company. They can easily have all that a corporation can get with just a bit of money. With a small amount of effort, good connections, and (optionally) owning Match Group, Reddit, Amazon, Facebook, Discord, etc - then they can access whole lot more about you.
For most people it won’t matter. But for the people it does matter for, it must be an utter terror.
As someone who works with the data from some of the vendors outlined in this article (and many others), I can confidently say, this data is not just public records, and the term "public records" is used to be deliberately obscure. What they really mean is the data that you give to other companies. It could be public records, such as real estate records, it could be "public" in the sense of details you publish online yourself, such as on LinkedIn or Facebook, or it could be details like who you bank with, the approximate values in each account, or what you like to spend your money on.
This is one of those things some people are okay with, up until the point where they get bitten by it. It's weird enough when someone sends you a congratulations on your new baby when you haven't told anyone, but it's really weird when you get the same congratulations for the baby didn't have.
Except replace "having a baby" with "went to prison." I think even you'd be upset if you started losing out on job opportunities because one of these services confused you with a convict of a similar name or address. Or your neighbors start dealing in scuttlebutt regarding something from these platforms.
> This is one of those things some people are okay with
People aren’t “ok with it”. The idea that people are ok with spying is one of those lies that the surveillance industry tells themselves. But they know it’s not true, which is why it’s always much harder to not be spied on than to accept the default. That’s why settings keep reverting to spying, and why almost no one chose to let Facebook track them when Apple gave the equal-handed option.
And yet we can't get effective privacy laws enacted in this country, outside of California. Why do you think that is?
I mean, the person I'm replying to justified their stance by basically say, "well the government does it and this power shouldn't be limited to just government bureaucrats" Which indicates to me that this an issue that falls largely across party lines. That would also explain why California's practically the only state with privacy laws with teeth.
Real answer? There are privacy advocates, but they haven’t proven to be a critical constituency for any campaign. If inaction on this issue won’t change people’s votes, there’s no reason for a politician to do anything, and a lot of reasons not to.
> This is one of those things some people are okay with, up until the point where they get bitten by it.
> I think even you'd be upset if you started losing out on job opportunities because one of these services confused you with a convict of a similar name or address.
Wait a sec, though. I think significantly fewer people (read: almost no people) are "okay with" misinformation being reported about them, than are okay with actual information about their history being reported. There are three separate cases here: (1) accurate information regarding whether a applicant is a potentially good customer based on their history, (2) accidentally inaccurate information about that, and (3) fraudulently inaccurate information about that. The "some people" who are okay with "this" are okay with the first. If you have to lump the second and third in to drum up outrage, maybe that's a sign that the outrage is not all that appropriate.
You're making my point. In your own words, "almost no people" would be okay with misinformation be sold about them. Yet misinformation is being sold them. And all these vendors hide behind the "we don't guarantee the accuracy of this data" disclaimer.
Requiring data sold to be accurate is a type of privacy regulation. And it's one that would basically kill all of these industries because nobody can make that guarantee.
I've just sent them a notice letter to delete my personal information under CA Consumer Privacy Act and they declined and I am pursuing further. If anyone would like to send a similar notice, it's very easy through https://yourdigitalrights.org/
This is obviously a terrible invasion of privacy, but that is not the only problem.
Information on credit reports is routinely wrong, and there in many cases it is virtually impossible to remove. I've had some random addresses listed as "previous addresses" on my credit report for decades, and no matter what sort of letters I write or how many hoops I jump through, they remain.
I got a new phone number last year, and still occasionally receive calls from whoever it was in South Carolina who previously had this number. What are the odds that a realtor is getting that person's data, instead of mine?
What if you are on a family plan, it is a business phone, or registered in someone else's name?
These may sound like edge cases but even if it is only 5% of people that's tens of millions of people in the USA alone who could potentially get screwed by this.
People genuinely have no idea how much information is out there about them. Not just from hacks but from “legitimate” sources like data brokers.
Part of me thinks it would be a service for some newspaper to just publish a searchable website of all of it, so people can really feel the impact of it. It would be impossible to ignore. Or maybe just the info for all politicians in Washington.
Of course, this would enable all of the bottom-feeding scammers to get it too, so it would probably do more harm than good.
>Part of me thinks it would be a service for some newspaper to just publish a searchable website of all of it, so people can really feel the impact of it.
Unfortunately this service already exists, but is not as yet public. It's called XKeyscore.
I am not sure why realtors haven't become obsolete in hot markets at least on the sellers side. 5% is a lot of money when your home is so valuable. Plus it's such a sellers market, where it seems like all the marketing you might have to do is put a listing with a couple terrible grainy photos on zillow and you will get 10 all cash offers by the end of the week. You don't even really need to bother with mls anymore which was the old artificial moat for the real estate profession. Buying side might be a different case, but at least as a seller I don't think you need to bother with taking nice photos, staging, marketing, hosting open houses, etc anymore. Times have changed.
As someone who recently (this month) bought a house in a hot market, the market is no longer anything like what you are describing. It is not necessarily a buyers market again yet, but it is definitely no longer a sellers market.
Things are sitting on the market for weeks. They get one offer, not cash, under asking, and they take it. Times have changed.
Obviously these things are regional, but looking at it federally, there are more units listed now than there have been since before COVID. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ACTLISCOUUS
As a first time buyer, the commission was totally worth it for such a major purchase. Yes, I could self-educate, but that leaves me open to beginner's mistakes.
As a first time seller, the amount of work to get my house sold was INSANE, even though I was only there three years. Yes, I could do it myself, but I have better things to do, and in this case, beginner's mistakes could have implications if I violate a law I don't understand.
It's the same reason why some people prefer to sell cars to a dealer instead of selling private market, or buying cars from a dealer instead of private market.
I never said it was easy? Additionally the issue isn't paying for a service, but that people are paying the commission as a percent rather than a fixed fee. Lastly, lots of other professions are difficult, and people make them work without taking a percent cut of the transaction via collusion — which is now being challenged, and costs are expected to go down, not up [1].
There are free or cheap services for those transactions that ensure total compliance with all laws and regulations and do all the work for you. Title agencies and banks.
Your hand-wavy "I might do something wrong" is just ignorant FUD.
> There are free or cheap services for those transactions that ensure total compliance with all laws and regulations and do all the work for you.
You're underestimating the value of my time, the amount of nitpicking that is involved with compliance, and the amount of haggling my realtor did behind the scenes.
This is shilling. Agents don't guarantee protection against any of that. They are even likely to silently conspire to hasten the sale by just keeping their mouth shut.
Hilarious how it's terror and/or think of the children nearly every time a privacy busting product or law is being pushed through or justified.
Attacks on Real Estate Agents: Be Prepared
Last month, the attack on a real estate agent in Encino, California, was brought to light as the incident was caught on camera. While we have all heard stories regarding the increase in attacks on agents, seeing it happen live on video made it very real for many and greatly impacted the agent community. No one wants to go to work afraid, not knowing who they will encounter each day.
People should report this company to California’s Office of the Attorney General, it should not be operating in California without respecting CCPA (and they cannot require a basis for your removal under CCPA).
They say the information they are dealing in is information that is exempted under CCPA:
> Importantly, FOREWARN’s products and services contain information that is collected, processed, sold, or disclosed subject to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), pursuant to the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994 (DPPA), and/or is considered publicly available information. Therefore, FOREWARN does not maintain processes for consumers to submit requests to FOREWARN under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) or any other state privacy law that exempts or excludes information subject to the GLBA or DPPA, or publicly available information
I haven't put my real phone number into an online shopping checkout in close to 20 years.
I've had problems exactly once, when an item sent was damaged in transit and returned to the mom-and-pop shop, and they couldn't get in touch with me. When I hadn't received the item two weeks after purchase, I called them and they happily sent a replacement.
I used to work for a company that gathered data about doctor's licenses and sanctions. All 50 States do it a little different and I helped with scraping some of the data. Sometimes we would have to buy the lists of sanctioned doctors--think about that, a State putting the list of board sanctioned doctors behind a paywall.
So, while every real estate agent has cheap and instant access to all this data, the public is behind a paywall to see which doctors have been sanctioned. Where did we go wrong?
A lack of trust in government, a belief all government services should pay for themselves, a lack of anti-trust enforcement, a lack of regulation on abusive and overly-capitalistic companies,
I could go on, but the list is basically what the average American seems to chide the EU for
Government services don't necessarily need to pay for themselves but they do need to be justified and paid for. "I want that" is not adequate justification and "any cost is acceptable, just take it from the rich or the businesses" is not an adequate payment scheme.
> Although some real estate agents say the financial information it returns saves time when finding clients most likely to have the budget for the houses they’re looking at, most agents and associations tout it primarily as a safety tool because it also supplies criminal records.
> In addition to those records, the product — owned by the data broker red violet — also supplies a given individual’s address history; phone, vehicle and property records; bankruptcies; and liens and judgements, including foreclosure histories.
> “It can be real creepy and you have to swear that you’re not going to use it in a wrong manner,” Hicks added, referring to Forewarn rules which say real estate agents can’t share data from the app publicly or with third parties, or use the app to pull information on non-professional contacts.
And with ~1.5M Realtors in the US, working for ~1/3M real estate firms, you know there will only be a trivial number of cases where it this product is misused...right?
Where’s the tool for buyers? If I’m going to go to an empty home with a person I don’t really know, I’d like to know their criminal history. Before I sign a contract with a realtor, maybe it would make sense for me to know that my agent isn’t in financial trouble.
There are some legit things to want to know about realtors. How many homes did they pressure people into whom then had various issues they needed to deal with? Or, did the realtor truly find a good fit for the buyer? How about conflicts of interest?
As an anecdote, my neighbors recently were screwed by a realtor that pressured them into a place where they then needed to drop 150k on repairs (about 15% total value). That same realtor was pressuring our HOA president to literally make up information for the resale information so that the forms could be handed back to the realtor just a couple days sooner. Of course all liability would have been on the HOA president and not the realtor.
With that said, a good history of what the realtor has sold before, & how the homebuyers felt about it would be a great tool..
Where do you draw the line though? So many situations in life where you are in a room with someone you don't really know. Eventually you have to go on blind faith for better or worse, because there's no time to vet each and every person you encounter.
So discrimination is ok because you know, we have to make as much money as possible