3 ms·

Maybe a completely naive question: Insurance companies seem to be one of the main entities interested in tracking such people down, and are pretty big, regulate

Maybe a completely naive question: Insurance companies seem to be one of the main entities interested in tracking such people down, and are pretty big, regulated companies. Meanwhile, some of the "unlicensed investigators" interviewed in the article openly admit to doing illegal things in their investigations, like obtaining phone records by impersonating phone company employees. Seems a bit brazen. Are there enough intermediaries to somehow give the big companies plausible deniability? Or do police just not care to crack down on this arrangement?

bdibs 7y ago
Given they hire them as a consultant or contractor, I'm sure there's plenty of plausible deniability on their end.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
As a guess: There's probably a lot of gray zone. When I worked in insurance, our HIPAA training indicated we could call a doctor and ask questions and pay the claim based on information obtained by phone. But we could also be told we needed to send a written request and HIPAA compliant authorization. For that and other reasons, I suspect jobs like private investigator exist precisely because they don't have to comply with the same rules as, say, the police. Reading further: Frank Ahearn is ....a skip tracer (i.e., unlicensed investigator) who has worked to find missing people when a private investigator can’t do so legally.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
How much privacy rights do dead people have?
- testvox 7y ago
  Dead people have basically no rights, at least in the United States.
  - matt-attack 7y ago
    Actually: > The HIPAA Privacy Rule protects the individually identifiable health information about a decedent for 50 years following the date of death of the individual. https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance/health-information-of-deceased-individuals/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance...
closeparen 7y ago
You don’t have to explain how you found someone. They can’t get one of your steps declared inadmissible and then have a second chance at running. I don’t see how the police would know, unless the phone company detected and reported it. You do sometimes see news stories about police officers getting caught selling DMV database queries to PIs.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  You even see stories about those officers going to jail, there was a pretty prominent case in the UK.
michaelt 7y ago
Are there enough intermediaries to somehow give the big companies plausible deniability? In the News International phone hacking scandal [1] the likes of Rebekah Brooks shredded a bunch of documents as investigators were closing in, then claimed they had no idea how their journalists had found all those otherwise-inexplicable scoops. As a punishment she was.... paid £10 million to resign, then hired back 4 years later. Using intermediaries for deniability works, simple as that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacking_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...

bdibs 7y ago

Given they hire them as a consultant or contractor, I'm sure there's plenty of plausible deniability on their end.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

As a guess: There's probably a lot of gray zone. When I worked in insurance, our HIPAA training indicated we could call a doctor and ask questions and pay the claim based on information obtained by phone. But we could also be told we needed to send a written request and HIPAA compliant authorization. For that and other reasons, I suspect jobs like private investigator exist precisely because they don't have to comply with the same rules as, say, the police. Reading further: Frank Ahearn is ....a skip tracer (i.e., unlicensed investigator) who has worked to find missing people when a private investigator can’t do so legally.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago

How much privacy rights do dead people have?

testvox 7y ago
Dead people have basically no rights, at least in the United States.
- matt-attack 7y ago
  Actually: > The HIPAA Privacy Rule protects the individually identifiable health information about a decedent for 50 years following the date of death of the individual. https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance/health-information-of-deceased-individuals/index.html https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/guidance...

closeparen 7y ago

You don’t have to explain how you found someone. They can’t get one of your steps declared inadmissible and then have a second chance at running. I don’t see how the police would know, unless the phone company detected and reported it. You do sometimes see news stories about police officers getting caught selling DMV database queries to PIs.

jacquesm 7y ago
You even see stories about those officers going to jail, there was a pretty prominent case in the UK.

michaelt 7y ago

Are there enough intermediaries to somehow give the big companies plausible deniability? In the News International phone hacking scandal [1] the likes of Rebekah Brooks shredded a bunch of documents as investigators were closing in, then claimed they had no idea how their journalists had found all those otherwise-inexplicable scoops. As a punishment she was.... paid £10 million to resign, then hired back 4 years later. Using intermediaries for deniability works, simple as that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacking_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...