Transunion Deploys Great New Tool for Stalking and Killing Ex-Wives

The phrase “disruptive technology” has long since been co-opted to mean “a new iPhone app for people to share photos of their meals” but it has an original and genuine meaning as well: any technology that matures faster than society’s ability to use it constructively. The list of disruptive technologies includes entries as diverse as mustard gas and the automobile itself, but the advent of the connected world has unleashed a diverse cornucopia of unintended consequences ranging from Amazon’s destruction of brick-and-mortar retailers to the corrosive effect that the various “reunion” and “classmates” websites have on American marriages.

TTAC has covered the world of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) several times, most recently discussing a company that assists police with collecting outstanding court costs and fines against motorists in traffic. We’ve also discussed the fact that governmental use of ALPRs amounts to a sort of camel’s nose under the tent.

Here’s the rest of the camel.

Founded by former cocaine smuggler Hank Asher, TLO is a data-mining corporation that was purchased by TransUnion, the credit bureau, a few years ago. The idea behind TLO is a fundamentally disruptive one: by using massive amounts of computer power to tie together disparate sources of legally acquired information, it’s possible to know more about someone than you could know simply by considering those information sources individually. The money-shot quote comes from Asher himself, regarding the September 11th attacks:

“You could accidentally live next door to Mohammed Atta… You couldn’t accidentally live next door to Mohammed Atta twice.”

The unspoken conclusion to that — so if you live next door to Mohammed Atta twice, you’re automatically guilty of terrorism — is either brilliant or utterly reprehensible, depending on where you personally stand on old-fashioned concepts like individual liberty and privacy. It’s also an example of how massive data-crunching is very good at establishing who someone is, or whom they might be.

Mr. Asher is dead now, but his philosophy lives on in the TLOxp Vehicle Sightings Data product. TLO brags that they have a billion sightings in their database and are adding fifty million sightings a month. Combined with TLO’s other sources of information, ranging from TransUnion’s extensive credit records to TLO’s social-media monitoring, this tool allows you to build an extensive portrait of someone based on a very small snippet of initial information.

What are the legitimate uses of this data? I can maybe think of one: repossessing a car. Maybe. Nor is TLO’s self-policing stance on the data’s use in any way reassuring. The company’s guidelines permit at least the following uses:

Use in the normal course of business by a legitimate business or its agents, employees, or contractors, but only to verify the accuracy of personal information submitted by the individual to the business or its agents, employees, or contractors; and, if such information as so submitted is not correct or is no longer correct, to obtain the correct information, but only for the purposes of preventing fraud by, pursuing legal remedies against, or recovering on a debt or security interest against, the individual… Use in connection with any civil, criminal, administrative, or arbitral proceeding, in any federal, state, or local court or agency, or before any self-regulatory body… Use by any insurer or insurance support organization, or by a self-insured entity… Use by any licensed private investigative agency or licensed security service for any purpose described above.

Self-regulatory bodies? Self-insured entities? Civil proceedings? Administrative proceedings? Is there any way to make those loopholes bigger? And why, exactly, do any of those broadly defined parties need information on someone’s physical location and travel habits? If I provide my home address to the nice people at Revzilla so they can ship me a new visor for my motorcycle helmet, are they automatically entitled to know which park I take my son to so he can fly a kite? If somebody decides to trip on my sidewalk and sue me, do they have the right to know that I was in Las Vegas two weekends ago?

No, the truth is almost certainly that this information will be most valuable to people who are likely to abuse it – and TLO almost certainly knows this. The fact that private investigative agencies are specifically named at the end of TLO’s dog-ate-my-homework list is all but a smoking gun. TLOxp’s ALPR system can instantly find needles in a billion-entry haystack. Consider the possibilities. You’re an abusive husband whose wife has fled the state. Under normal circumstances, you’d find it difficult to locate her — but she has to register a car if she wants to have a job or a life most places, and TLOxp can find that car. So even if she’s savvy enough to use a dropbox service or a relative for all of her credit-related activities, TLOxp can still tell you where that woman works, where she travels, where she spends her nights.

Is your use of the system legitimate? If you’re engaged in a court proceeding against her, probably. If she’s a creditor of yours, perhaps by dint of escaping with your car, then absolutely. If you aren’t engaged in a court case against her, of course, you can always start a frivolous one — and indeed, abusive spouses rank high on the lists of frivolous litigators. Or you can just slip the private investigator an extra thousand bucks. I’ve hired PIs in the past for various business-related purposes and I have to say that none of them ever struck me as paragons of personal integrity.

It’s safe to say that the laws regarding license plates and vehicle registrations in this country were not written with a capacity like this in mind. The governmental creation of a nationwide personal-tracking database would be the sort of thing that unites all but the most hardcore statists against it. The private creation of such a database is a thousand times worse, since it’s available to the government as well as to private entities, but suffers from none of the restrictions that would inevitably hamper such a thing were it to be instituted on a federal level.

With any luck, this truly disruptive technology will eventually be strongly regulated in the public interest. In the meantime … um, I don’t know, try not to make anybody mad at you? Write to your ex-husband and beg his forgiveness? Take the subway? Just hope for the best? Use a homemade license-plate flipper?