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Comment by droopyEyelids | Hacker News Reader

Lexis nexis is way beyond what you’re describing. Its basically a company that forms dossiers on every person, even if they had no digital footprint.

It combines every source of public data possible, and even includes court records that are sealed or expunged

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How does it have access to sealed court records?

I thought the whole point of "sealed" meant that the contents of the case were off-limits to the public for any and all reasons

Most cases are not sealed from the outset - so anything already out there is indexed forever, regardless of current legal status.

This was the case at least when I looked into in ~20 years ago. There simply was no point in following the expungement process since all the usefulness of it was already gone due to the records existing in private databases.

Expungement is still useful (though less useful) because the record can no longer be used as a part of the legal process.

Little stays sealed for ever, and sealed documents are often mistakenly filed openly. IF you're in the data collection/scavenging business it's not that hard to get hold of stuff that wasn't meant to be circulated.

All they had to do was scrape public records before they were sealed or expunged. When a record is sealed or expunged, that only means the court stops publishing it or deletes their record. Anyone who retrieved it before that doesn't have to give it back and nobody's memory gets wiped.

But the court also can’t confirm the veracity of the claimed record. Anyone can say ‘there was a record of nonameiguess being charged with this crime in this court on this date but it’s since been expunged’. Okay, but you’re not that court, and the official records don’t exist so… what good does it do?

LN: "Sorry you don't get a house|job|whatever"

You: "Um, why not?"

LN: "That's our secret"

Course you won't even know LN is even involved in the loop. You're being judged in a court of opinion with no recourse.

In this case they are probably just keeping a record of the fact you have a sealed record.

They are off limit to the public, but if at one time they werent then lexis scooped them up.

Yes, also people dramatically undervalue how substantial the absence of data is when it comes to profiling someone. Especially when you compare it to other data points, for example not having credit cards on record is enough information to start building a whole lot of other connections.

No, it's exactly what I'm describing... courts generate data about you, someone (LN as an example) slurps it up. Buy a house, deed gets recorded, data gets generated and someone slurps it up.

Buy a product with a CC. All of the half dozen to dozen vendors involved in the transaction will generate data about you and sell/trade the data to other people.

Sure, LN might have some really good profiles, but there are so, so many companies doing the similar things.

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