The Quiet Observer: ChoicePoint's Trajectory from 1997 to 2008
ChoicePoint was a U.S. data brokerage company founded in 1997 as a spin-off from credit reporting firm Equifax, which collected and sold vast amounts of data about individuals and businesses. The company served markets as diverse as insurance, business, government, and marketing, and handled detailed information about individuals, including Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, address histories, and financial information.
Notably, ChoicePoint's clients included approximately 7,000 departments of justice at the federal, state, and local levels, and it also provided extensive information to law enforcement agencies. In this way, the company also served as an infrastructure for national surveillance investigations.
In 2005, however, ChoicePoint experienced a major data breach in which the personal information of approximately 163,000 individuals was illegally obtained, resulting in at least 800 cases of identity theft. The Federal Trade Commission ordered the company to pay $10 million in civil penalties and $5 million in consumer redress following the incident. A subsequent data breach in 2008 resulted in another $275,000 fine.
In 2008, ChoicePoint was acquired by Reed Elsevier for $4.1 billion and integrated as part of LexisNexis Risk Solutions. This allowed the company's database and monitoring capabilities to be utilized on a larger and more sophisticated scale.
No comments:
Post a Comment