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My wife's SSN/credit history/online identities have in the past been mistakenly tied up with her sibling's. This has since been corrected with all the appropriate agencies and organizations. However, from what I've noticed of search results over time, these background check (AND identity verification) sites crawl each other and create a kind of feedback loop, as I've been noticing that some of these pages will falsely report parts of her sibling's background among her own, and falsely flag her as having certain ugly events in her past that don't actually belong to her. This is concerning, as her career area cares a lot about employees having a clean background, and employers using these cheap automated options see cheap, inaccurate results. She has a squeaky clean background with a high credit score and impressive educational credentials, while her sibling has had run-ins with the law and bad debts. I'm concerned about how this will affect her future career prospects. Beyond background checks, identity verification is a big concern as well. You may have noticed some services ask you to confirm certain facts about your past (street names of where you've lived, schools you attended, jobs and cars you've held). When pulling her credit bureau reports, some of these verifications required confirming facts about her sibling rather than her own in order to gain access. Like I said, these issues have been fixed with all the "official" record-keeping organizations; however, since the fix, I've been noticing increasing issues with the original mistakes propagating to 3rd-party background-check organizations. These services cause more problems than they solve, and should require consent, oversight, and civil or criminal penalties associated with a failure to meet high quality standards. |
Existing law does not proscribe recklessly sharing damaging false information about people?