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Open to research yes. Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks. AI firms have shown

Open to research yes. Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks. AI firms have shown themselves to be playing fast and loose with copyrighted works, a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that would otherwise have been expunged after a few years.

evolve2k 8mo ago
Fully agree. The AI companies have broken the basic pacts of public open data. Their ignoring of robots.txt files is but one example of their lack of regard. With the open commons being quickly pillaged we’ll end up in a “community member access only model”. A shift from grab any books here you like just get them back in a month; to you’ll need to register as a library member before you can borrow. I see that’s where we’ll end up. Public blogs and websites will suffer and respond first is my prediction.
harel 8mo ago
Between not delivering the data to AI companies, and barring it altogether is a fair distance. As far as I know, the MoJ is in talks with openAI themselves (https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/ministry-of-justice-reaches-agreement-with-openai https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/ministry-of-justice-rea...).
spacebanana7 8mo ago
The names of minors should never be released in public (with a handful of exceptions). But why shouldn't a 19 year old shoplifter have that on their public record? Would you prevent newspapers from reporting on it, or stop users posting about it on public forums?
- criddell 8mo ago
  Would you want the first thing to show up after somebody googles your name to be an accusation for improper conduct around a child? In theory, people could dig deeper and find out you won in court and were acquitted, but people here should know that nobody ever reads the article...
  - RobotToaster 8mo ago
    If it was reported in a newspaper then that would likely already be the case.
  - spacebanana7 8mo ago
    If you were hiring a childminder for your kids, would you want to know that they had 6 accusations for improper conduct around children in 6 different court cases - even if those were all acquittals?
    - JadeNB 8mo ago
      As a parent, I would want to know everything about anyone who's going to be around my children in any capacity. That doesn't mean I have a right to it, though.
      - dirasieb 8mo ago
        >openly admits his beliefs results in parents not making good decisions on who to allow near their children, keeps going anyway great moral system you have there
        criddell 8mo ago
        That's a bad faith take. In one comment you managed to violate a whole bunch of the HN commenting guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        dirasieb 8mo ago
        how else would you interpret admitting you don't think parents should have a right to know the backgrounds of the people with access to their children before making informed decisions on whether or not to allow it? please, show me your good faith interpretation and i will take back my comment
- tchalla 8mo ago
  > Would you prevent newspapers from reporting on it, or stop users posting about it on public forums? Yes
  - alberto467 8mo ago
    It is the UK we're talking about after all...
    - niels8472 8mo ago
      Where the accused have rights too?
      - alberto467 8mo ago
        Where the journalists have very little rights, and people posting their bad (wrong) ideas (think) even less so.
        niels8472 8mo ago
        Not according to the wpfi world press freedom index where it is ranked 20th.
      - mrkstu 8mo ago
        Where speaking truth isn’t a right or a defense
    - pelorat 8mo ago
      Most media in Europe are required to ambiguate names of criminals. For instance by removing the first name or the last name.
- newsclues 8mo ago
  If you prohibit the punishment of minors, you create an incentive for criminals to exploit minors. Why are we protecting criminals, just because they are minors? Protect victims, not criminals. Unfortunately reputational damage is part of the punishment (I have a criminal record), but maybe it's moronic to create a class of people who can avoid meaningful punishment for crimes?
  - tyre 8mo ago
    We protect minors because they are children, and they are allowed to make mistakes. At a certain point, we say someone is an adult and fully responsible for their actions, because “that’s who they are”. It’s not entirely nuanced—and in the US, at least, we charge children as adults all the time—but it’s understandable.
    - newsclues 8mo ago
      But you create an incentive for organized crime to recruit youth to commit crimes and not have to suffer the consequences. At a certain point, poorly thought out "protections", turn into a system that protects organized crime, because criminals aren't as stupid as lawmakers, and exploit the system. There is a big difference between making a mistake as a kid that lands you in trouble, and working as a underling for organized crime to commit robberies, drug deals, and violent crime, and not having to face responsibility for their actions. The legal system has so many loopholes for youth, for certain groups, that the law is no longer fair, and that is its own problem, contributing to the decline of public trust.
      - ryandrake 8mo ago
        What's the alternative? A 14 year old steals a pack of gum, and he's listed as a shoplifter for the rest of his life? Just because exceptions are exploitable, doesn't mean we should just scrap all the exceptions. Why not improve the wording and try to work around the exceptions?
        Fogest 8mo ago
bko 8mo ago
Im sorry but that's the equivalent of "I believe in free speech but not the right to hate speech". Its either free or not
- alberto467 8mo ago
  I believe it would be more accurate to say: "I believe in free speech but only from accredited researchers. Oh btw the government can also make laws to control such accreditation"
- whizzter 8mo ago
  Actually it isn't the same. We can allow access to private persons while disallowing commercial usage and forbid data processing of private information (outside of law enforcement access). Kinda like it was in pre-digital days, no we can't go back but we can at least _try_ to make PII information safeguarded. Most EU countries have digital ID's, restricting and logging (for a limited time) all access to records to prevent mis-use. Anyone caught trying to scrape can be restricted without limiting people from accessing or searching for specific _records or persons of interest_ (seriously, would anyone have time to read more than a couple of records each day?).
carlosjobim 8mo ago
No, public doesn't mean access should be limited to academics of acceptable political alignment, it means open to the public: everybody. That is the entire point of having courts, since the time of Hammurabi. Otherwise it's back to the clan system, where justice is made by avenging blood. Making and using any "profiles" of people is an entirely different thing than having court rulings accessible to the public.
- whizzter 8mo ago
  Exactly, public means to the _public_, just because it's persons of the public doesn't mean that corporations are entitled to be able to use or profit from that material.
londons_explore 8mo ago
"court records are public forever" and "records of crimes expunged after X years" are incompatible. Instead, we should make it illegal to discriminate based on criminal conviction history. Just like it is currently illegal to discriminate based on race or religion. That data should not be illegal to know, but illegal to use to make most decisions relating to that person.
- mikkupikku 8mo ago
  You'd need so many exceptions to such a law it would be leakier than a sieve. It sounds like a fine idea at ten thousand feet but it immediately breaks down when you get into the nitty gritty of what crimes and what what jobs we're talking about.
- FunHearing3443 8mo ago
  Curious, why should conviction history not be a factor? I could see the argument that previous convictions could indicate a lack of commitment to no longer committing crimes.
  - garblegarble 8mo ago
    I couldn't parse the intended meaning from "lack of commitment to no longer commiting crimes"), so here's a response that just answers the question raised. Do you regard the justice system as a method of rehabilitating offenders and returning them to try to be productive members of society, or do you consider it to be a system for punishment? If the latter, is it Just for society to punish somebody for the rest of their life for a crime, even if the criminal justice considers them safe to release into society? Is there anything but a negative consequence for allowing a spent conviction to limit people's ability to work, or to own/rent a home? We have carve-outs for sensitive positions (e.g. working with children/vulnerable adults) Consider what you would do in that position if you had genuinely turned a corner but were denied access to jobs you're qualified for?
  - contravariant 8mo ago
    The short answer is that it's up to a judge to decide that, up to the law what it's based on and up to the people what the law is. Sure there is still some leeway between only letting a judge decide the punishment and full on mob rule, but it's not a slippery slope fallacy when the slope is actually slippy. It's fairly easy to abuse the leeway to discriminate to exclude political dissidents for instance.
philipwhiuk 8mo ago
> a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that would otherwise have been expunged after a few years. The idea that society is required to forget crime is pretty toxic honestly.
- ryandrake 8mo ago
  Society does a poor job of assessing the degree of crime. It's too binary for people: You're either a criminal or not. There are too many employers who would look at a 40 year old sitting in front of them applying for a job, search his criminal record, find he stole a candy bar when he was 15, and declare him to be "a criminal" ineligible for employment.
  - Ajedi32 8mo ago
    A less incompetent employer would look at the conviction, realize if was for stealing a candy bar 25 years ago, and decide it doesn't matter. Though if the details of the case were not public or hard to access they might assume it was worse than it was. (Realistically no child would get prosecuted for stealing a candy bar one time, but I'll grant maybe there are other convictions that sound worse without context.) Maybe the problem is actually that the data is not accessible enough, rather than too accessible?
- orthoxerox 8mo ago
  The idea that society is required to forgive crime is pretty Christian, though.
  - Muromec 8mo ago
    that part of Christianity somehow is lost on Americans somehow.
DharmaPolice 8mo ago
Records of cases involving children are already excluded so that's not a relevant risk.
reactordev 8mo ago
>”Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks.” 1000x this. It’s one thing to have a felony for manslaughter. It’s another to have a felony for drug possession. In either case, if enough time has passed, and they have shown that they are reformed (long employment, life events, etc) then I think it should be removed from consideration. Not expunged or removed from record, just removed from any decision making. The timeline for this can be based on severity with things like rape and murder never expiring from consideration. There needs to be a statute of limitations just like there is for reporting the crimes. What I’m saying is, if you were stupid after your 18th birthday and caught a charge peeing on a cop car while publicly intoxicated, I don’t think that should be a factor when your 45 applying for a job after going to college, having a family, having a 20 year career, etc.
- mschuster91 8mo ago
  > What I’m saying is, if you were stupid after your 18th birthday and caught a charge peeing on a cop car while publicly intoxicated, I don’t think that should be a factor when your 45 applying for a job after going to college, having a family, having a 20 year career, etc. I'd go further and say a lot of charges and convictions shouldn't be a matter of public record that everyone can look up in the first place, at least not with a trivial index. File the court judgement and other documentation under a case number, ban reindexing by third parties (AI scrapers, "background check" services) entirely. That way, anyone interested can still go and review court judgements for glaring issues, but a "pissed on a patrol car" conviction won't hinder that person's employment perspectives forever. In Germany for example, we have something called the Führungszeugnis - a certificate by the government showing that you haven't been convicted of a crime that warranted more than three months of imprisonment or the equivalent in monthly earning as a financial fine. Most employers don't even request that, only employers in security-sensitive environments, public service or anything to do with children (the latter get a certificate also including a bunch of sex pest crimes in the query).
  - piperswe 8mo ago
    The UK has common law: the outcomes of previous court cases and the arguments therein determine what the law is. It’s important that court records be public then, because otherwise there’s no way to tell what the law is.
kittbuilds 8mo ago
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jjk166 8mo ago
> Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? You're conflating two distinct issues - access to information, and making bad decisions based on that information. Blocking access to the information is the wrong way to deal with this problem. > a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that would otherwise have been expunged after a few years. This would be a perfect example of something which should be made open after a delay. If the information is expunged before the delay, there's nothing to make open.
- closewith 8mo ago
  > Blocking access to the information is the wrong way to deal with this problem. That's an assertion, but what's your reasoning? > This would be a perfect example of something which should be made open after a delay. If the information is expunged before the delay, there's nothing to make open. All across the EU, that information would be available immediately to journalists under exemptions for the Processing of Personal Data Solely for Journalistic Purposes, but would be simultaneously unlawful for any AI company to process for any other purposes (unless they had another legal basis like a Government contract).
- autoexec 8mo ago
  > Blocking access to the information is the wrong way to deal with this problem. Blocking (or more accurately: restricting) access works pretty well for many other things that we know will be used in ways that are harmful. Historically, just having to go in person to a court house and request to view records was enough to keep most people from abusing the public information they had. It's perfectly valid to say that we want information accessible, but not accessible over the internet or in AI datasets. What do you think the "right way" to deal with the problem is because we already know that "hope that people choose to be better/smarter/more respectful" isn't going work.
  - jjk166 8mo ago
    > Blocking (or more accurately: restricting) access works pretty well for many other things that we know will be used in ways that are harmful. Historically, just having to go in person to a court house and request to view records was enough to keep most people from abusing the public information they had. If all you care about is preventing the information from being abused, preventing it from being used is a great option. This has significant negative side effects though. For court cases it means a lack of accountability for the justice system, excessive speculation in the court of public opinion, social stigma and innuendo, and the use of inappropriate proxies in lieu of good data. The fact that the access speedbump which supposedly worked in the past is no longer good enough is proof that an access speedbump is not a good way to do it. Let's say we block internet access but keep in person records access in place. What's to stop Google or anyone else from hiring a person to go visit the brick and mortar repositories to get the data exactly the same way they sent cars to map all the streets? Anything that makes it hard for giant companies is going to make it hard for the common person. And why are we making the assumption that AI training on this data is a net social ill? While we can certainly imagine abuses, it's not hard to imagine real benefits today, nonetheless unforeseen benefits someone more clever than us will come up with in the future. > What do you think the "right way" to deal with the problem is because we already know that "hope that people choose to be better/smarter/more respectful" isn't going work. We've been dealing with people making bad decisions from data forever. As an example, there was red lining where institutions would refuse to sell homes or guarantee loans for minorities. Sometimes they would use computer models which didn't track skin color but had some proxy for it. At the end of the day you can't stop this problem by trying to hide what race people are. You need to explicitly ban that behavior. And we did. Institutions that attempt it are vulnerable to both investigation by government agencies and liability to civil suit from their victims. It's not perfect, there are still abuses, but it's so much better than if we all just closed our eyes and pretended that if the data were harder to get the discrimination wouldn't happen. If you don't want algorithms to come to spurious and discriminatory conclusions, you must make algorithms auditable, and give the public reasonable access to interrogate these algorithms that impact them. If an AI rejects my loan application, you better be able to prove that the AI isn't doing so based on my skin color. If you can do that, you should also be able to prove it's not doing so based off an expunged record. If evidence comes out that the AI has been using such data to come to such decisions, those who made it and those who employ it should be liable for damages, and depending on factors like intent, adherence to best practices, and severity potentially face criminal prosecution. Basically AI should be treated exactly the same as a human using the same data to come to the same conclusion.
DebtDeflation 8mo ago
Totally agree. And it goes beyond criminal history. Just because I choose to make a dataset publicly available doesn't mean I want some AI memorizing it and using it to generate profit.
- naasking 8mo ago
  Publishing something publicly means readers can do anything they want with the knowledge they gained from it. They just can't redistribute it verbatim due to copyright.
yxhuvud 8mo ago
What we do here in sweden is that you can ask the courts for any court document (unless it is confidential for some reason). But the courts are allowed to do it conditionally, so a common condition if you ask for a lot of cases is to condition it to redact any PII before making the data searchable. Having the effect that people that actually care and know what to look for, can find information. But you can't randomly just search for someone and see what you get. There is also a second registry separate from the courts that used to keep track of people that have been convicted during the last n years that is used for backgrounds checks etc.
slashdev 8mo ago
AI isn't the problem here. Once something goes on the internet it lives forever (or should be treated as such). So has it always been. If something is expungable it probably shouldn't be public record. Otherwise it should be open and scrapable and ingested by both search engines and AI.
ivan_gammel 8mo ago
Names and other PII can be replaced with aliases in bulk data, unsealed after ID verification on specific requests and within quotas. It’s not a big problem.
jdhahana 8mo ago
Thanks, it’s super refreshing to hear this take. I fear where we are headed. I robbed a drug dealer some odd 15 years ago while strung out. No excuses, but I paid my debt (4-11 years in state max, did min) yet I still feel like a have this weight I can’t shake. I have worked for almost the whole time, am no longer on parole or probation. Paid all fines. I honestly felt terrible for what I did. At the time I had a promising career and a secret clearance. I still work in tech as a 1099 making way less than I should. But that is life. What does a background check matter when the first 20 links on Google is about me committing a robbery with a gun? Edit: mine is an extreme and violent case. But I humbly believe, to my benefit surely, that once I paid all debts it should be done. That is what the 8+ years of parole/probation/counseling was for.
Muromec 8mo ago
>Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks. Is this the UK thing where PII is part of the released dataset? I know that Ukrainian rulings are all public, but the PII is redacted, so you can train your AI on largely anonymized rulings. I think it should also be against GDPR to process sensitive PII like health records and criminal convictions without consent, but once it hits the public record, it's free to use.
itsthecourier 8mo ago
I know some countries that emit a "certificate of no judicial history", even when the citizen has so, if they ended the jail time I think this is wrong, it should be reported entirely at least for 5 years after the fact happened
- hananova 8mo ago
  The jail time is the entire punishment. To allow punishment to continue afterward is to invite recidivism.
  - Muromec 8mo ago
    Jail time is not always the entire punishment, especially on the enlightened continent, where jail time is used sparingly. Keeping the conviction on record is a thing, because consecutive convictions often carry come with higher punishment. So depending on a crime cathegory, there is X years after which the record no longer counts, but it's not 0.
dmitrygr 8mo ago
> a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that would otherwise have been expunged after a few years. On the other hand, perpetrating crime is a GREAT predictor of perpetrating more crime -- in general most crime is perpetrated by past perps. Why should this info not be available to help others avoid troublemakers? https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/returning-prison-0 https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/returning-prison-0 https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/sex_offense_recidivism_2019.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/sex_offense_recidivism_2... https://usafacts.org/articles/how-common-is-it-for-released-prisoners-to-re-offend/ https://usafacts.org/articles/how-common-is-it-for-released-... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/ https://ciceroinstitute.org/research/the-case-for-incarceration/ https://ciceroinstitute.org/research/the-case-for-incarcerat... https://bjs.ojp.gov/topics/recidivism-and-reentry https://bjs.ojp.gov/topics/recidivism-and-reentry
bhawks 8mo ago
The actions of the government should always be publicly observable. This is what keeps it accountable. The fear that a person might be unfairly treated due to a long past indiscretion does not outweigh the public's right to observe and hold the government to account. Alternatively consider that you are assuming the worst behavior of the public and the best behavior of the government if you support this and it should be obvious the dangerous position this creates.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
roysting 8mo ago
Can you explain your reasoning about “forever convictions”, and for full disclosure, do you have a conviction and are thereby biased? Additionally, do you want a special class of privileged people, like a priestly class, who can interpret the data/bible for the peasantry? That mentality seems the same as that behind the old Latin bibles and Latin mass that people were abused to attend, even though they had no idea what was being said. So who would you bequeath the privileges of doing “research”?Only the true believers who believe what you believe so you wouldn’t have to be confronted with contradictions? And how would you prevent data exfiltration? Would you have your authorized “researchers” maybe go to a building, we can call it the Ministry of Truth, where they would have access to the information through telescreen terminals like how the DOJ is controlling the Epstein Files and then monitoring what the Congressmen were searching for? Think we would have discovered all we have discovered if only the Epstein people that rule the country had access to the Epstein files? Yes, convictions are permanent records of one’s offenses against society, especially the egregious offenses we call felonies on the USA. Should I as someone looking for a CFO or just an accountant not have the right that to know that someone was convicted of financial crimes, which is usually long precipitated by other transgressions and things like “mistakes” everyone knows weren’t mistakes? How would any professional association limit certification if that information is not accessible? So Madoff should Ave been able to get out and continue being involved in finances and investments? Please explain
AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
A thing can't simultaneously be public and not. There is no license to do research nor should there be, so if researchers can get it then anyone can. If it's not supposed to be public then don't publish it. If it's supposed to be public then stop trying to restrict it.
Ajedi32 8mo ago
If you commit a crime, get caught, and that makes people trust you less in the future, that's just the natural consequences of your own actions. No, I don't think if you shoplift as a teenager and get caught, charged, and convicted that automatically makes you a shoplifter for the rest of your life, but you also don't just get to wave a magic wand and make everyone forget you did what you did. You need to demonstrate you've changed and rebuild trust through your actions, and it's up to each individual person to decide whether they're convinced your trustworthy, not some government official with a delete button.
bell-cot 8mo ago
Before you even get to the "AI dataset ... forever-conviction" or copyright issues, you need to address AI's propensity to hallucinate when fed legal data and questions.
jalapenos 8mo ago
The crime having happened is forever. No-one is entitled to have it forcibly forgotten. That's up to other people to decide.
topherhunt 8mo ago
Jeez this seems totally backwards to me. I'd rather live in a society where court records are as open and public as safely possible (like GP's vision) and we as a society adjust our norms such that it's assholish and discriminatory to pass over someone for hiring just because they shoplifted when they were 15. There will for sure be major backlash against "permanent criminal" datasets (bringing up AI in this is a red herring, it's not fundamentally different from if someone were serving such a database using CGI scripts; AI just gives us more reach to do the things we were already committed to doing). But I frankly don't sympathize with the attitude that people should have the right to pretend that past decisions never happened. You also shouldn't be permanently _punished_ or _ostracized_ for your past self's decisions. But nor should you have the right to expect total anonymity / clean slate disconnected from your past self's decisions. My probably unpopular view: The right direction is for us as a society to recognize and acknowledge that people change and _need to be allowed to change_ -- not take the easy hack of erasing history. The cost for larger-scale public transparency & institutional change efforts is just too high.

evolve2k 8mo ago

Fully agree. The AI companies have broken the basic pacts of public open data. Their ignoring of robots.txt files is but one example of their lack of regard. With the open commons being quickly pillaged we’ll end up in a “community member access only model”. A shift from grab any books here you like just get them back in a month; to you’ll need to register as a library member before you can borrow. I see that’s where we’ll end up. Public blogs and websites will suffer and respond first is my prediction.

harel 8mo ago

Between not delivering the data to AI companies, and barring it altogether is a fair distance. As far as I know, the MoJ is in talks with openAI themselves (https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/ministry-of-justice-reaches-agreement-with-openai https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/ministry-of-justice-rea...).

spacebanana7 8mo ago

The names of minors should never be released in public (with a handful of exceptions). But why shouldn't a 19 year old shoplifter have that on their public record? Would you prevent newspapers from reporting on it, or stop users posting about it on public forums?

criddell 8mo ago
Would you want the first thing to show up after somebody googles your name to be an accusation for improper conduct around a child? In theory, people could dig deeper and find out you won in court and were acquitted, but people here should know that nobody ever reads the article...
- RobotToaster 8mo ago
  If it was reported in a newspaper then that would likely already be the case.
- spacebanana7 8mo ago
  If you were hiring a childminder for your kids, would you want to know that they had 6 accusations for improper conduct around children in 6 different court cases - even if those were all acquittals?
  - JadeNB 8mo ago
    As a parent, I would want to know everything about anyone who's going to be around my children in any capacity. That doesn't mean I have a right to it, though.
    - dirasieb 8mo ago
      >openly admits his beliefs results in parents not making good decisions on who to allow near their children, keeps going anyway great moral system you have there
      - criddell 8mo ago
        That's a bad faith take. In one comment you managed to violate a whole bunch of the HN commenting guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        dirasieb 8mo ago
        how else would you interpret admitting you don't think parents should have a right to know the backgrounds of the people with access to their children before making informed decisions on whether or not to allow it? please, show me your good faith interpretation and i will take back my comment
tchalla 8mo ago
> Would you prevent newspapers from reporting on it, or stop users posting about it on public forums? Yes
- alberto467 8mo ago
  It is the UK we're talking about after all...
  - niels8472 8mo ago
    Where the accused have rights too?
    - alberto467 8mo ago
      Where the journalists have very little rights, and people posting their bad (wrong) ideas (think) even less so.
      - niels8472 8mo ago
        Not according to the wpfi world press freedom index where it is ranked 20th.
    - mrkstu 8mo ago
      Where speaking truth isn’t a right or a defense
  - pelorat 8mo ago
    Most media in Europe are required to ambiguate names of criminals. For instance by removing the first name or the last name.
newsclues 8mo ago
If you prohibit the punishment of minors, you create an incentive for criminals to exploit minors. Why are we protecting criminals, just because they are minors? Protect victims, not criminals. Unfortunately reputational damage is part of the punishment (I have a criminal record), but maybe it's moronic to create a class of people who can avoid meaningful punishment for crimes?
- tyre 8mo ago
  We protect minors because they are children, and they are allowed to make mistakes. At a certain point, we say someone is an adult and fully responsible for their actions, because “that’s who they are”. It’s not entirely nuanced—and in the US, at least, we charge children as adults all the time—but it’s understandable.
  - newsclues 8mo ago
    But you create an incentive for organized crime to recruit youth to commit crimes and not have to suffer the consequences. At a certain point, poorly thought out "protections", turn into a system that protects organized crime, because criminals aren't as stupid as lawmakers, and exploit the system. There is a big difference between making a mistake as a kid that lands you in trouble, and working as a underling for organized crime to commit robberies, drug deals, and violent crime, and not having to face responsibility for their actions. The legal system has so many loopholes for youth, for certain groups, that the law is no longer fair, and that is its own problem, contributing to the decline of public trust.
    - ryandrake 8mo ago
      What's the alternative? A 14 year old steals a pack of gum, and he's listed as a shoplifter for the rest of his life? Just because exceptions are exploitable, doesn't mean we should just scrap all the exceptions. Why not improve the wording and try to work around the exceptions?
      - Fogest 8mo ago

bko 8mo ago

Im sorry but that's the equivalent of "I believe in free speech but not the right to hate speech". Its either free or not

alberto467 8mo ago
I believe it would be more accurate to say: "I believe in free speech but only from accredited researchers. Oh btw the government can also make laws to control such accreditation"
whizzter 8mo ago
Actually it isn't the same. We can allow access to private persons while disallowing commercial usage and forbid data processing of private information (outside of law enforcement access). Kinda like it was in pre-digital days, no we can't go back but we can at least _try_ to make PII information safeguarded. Most EU countries have digital ID's, restricting and logging (for a limited time) all access to records to prevent mis-use. Anyone caught trying to scrape can be restricted without limiting people from accessing or searching for specific _records or persons of interest_ (seriously, would anyone have time to read more than a couple of records each day?).

carlosjobim 8mo ago

No, public doesn't mean access should be limited to academics of acceptable political alignment, it means open to the public: everybody. That is the entire point of having courts, since the time of Hammurabi. Otherwise it's back to the clan system, where justice is made by avenging blood. Making and using any "profiles" of people is an entirely different thing than having court rulings accessible to the public.

whizzter 8mo ago
Exactly, public means to the _public_, just because it's persons of the public doesn't mean that corporations are entitled to be able to use or profit from that material.

londons_explore 8mo ago

"court records are public forever" and "records of crimes expunged after X years" are incompatible. Instead, we should make it illegal to discriminate based on criminal conviction history. Just like it is currently illegal to discriminate based on race or religion. That data should not be illegal to know, but illegal to use to make most decisions relating to that person.

mikkupikku 8mo ago
You'd need so many exceptions to such a law it would be leakier than a sieve. It sounds like a fine idea at ten thousand feet but it immediately breaks down when you get into the nitty gritty of what crimes and what what jobs we're talking about.
FunHearing3443 8mo ago
Curious, why should conviction history not be a factor? I could see the argument that previous convictions could indicate a lack of commitment to no longer committing crimes.
- garblegarble 8mo ago
  I couldn't parse the intended meaning from "lack of commitment to no longer commiting crimes"), so here's a response that just answers the question raised. Do you regard the justice system as a method of rehabilitating offenders and returning them to try to be productive members of society, or do you consider it to be a system for punishment? If the latter, is it Just for society to punish somebody for the rest of their life for a crime, even if the criminal justice considers them safe to release into society? Is there anything but a negative consequence for allowing a spent conviction to limit people's ability to work, or to own/rent a home? We have carve-outs for sensitive positions (e.g. working with children/vulnerable adults) Consider what you would do in that position if you had genuinely turned a corner but were denied access to jobs you're qualified for?
- contravariant 8mo ago
  The short answer is that it's up to a judge to decide that, up to the law what it's based on and up to the people what the law is. Sure there is still some leeway between only letting a judge decide the punishment and full on mob rule, but it's not a slippery slope fallacy when the slope is actually slippy. It's fairly easy to abuse the leeway to discriminate to exclude political dissidents for instance.

philipwhiuk 8mo ago

> a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that would otherwise have been expunged after a few years. The idea that society is required to forget crime is pretty toxic honestly.

ryandrake 8mo ago
Society does a poor job of assessing the degree of crime. It's too binary for people: You're either a criminal or not. There are too many employers who would look at a 40 year old sitting in front of them applying for a job, search his criminal record, find he stole a candy bar when he was 15, and declare him to be "a criminal" ineligible for employment.
- Ajedi32 8mo ago
  A less incompetent employer would look at the conviction, realize if was for stealing a candy bar 25 years ago, and decide it doesn't matter. Though if the details of the case were not public or hard to access they might assume it was worse than it was. (Realistically no child would get prosecuted for stealing a candy bar one time, but I'll grant maybe there are other convictions that sound worse without context.) Maybe the problem is actually that the data is not accessible enough, rather than too accessible?
orthoxerox 8mo ago
The idea that society is required to forgive crime is pretty Christian, though.
- Muromec 8mo ago
  that part of Christianity somehow is lost on Americans somehow.

DharmaPolice 8mo ago

Records of cases involving children are already excluded so that's not a relevant risk.

reactordev 8mo ago

>”Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks.” 1000x this. It’s one thing to have a felony for manslaughter. It’s another to have a felony for drug possession. In either case, if enough time has passed, and they have shown that they are reformed (long employment, life events, etc) then I think it should be removed from consideration. Not expunged or removed from record, just removed from any decision making. The timeline for this can be based on severity with things like rape and murder never expiring from consideration. There needs to be a statute of limitations just like there is for reporting the crimes. What I’m saying is, if you were stupid after your 18th birthday and caught a charge peeing on a cop car while publicly intoxicated, I don’t think that should be a factor when your 45 applying for a job after going to college, having a family, having a 20 year career, etc.

mschuster91 8mo ago
> What I’m saying is, if you were stupid after your 18th birthday and caught a charge peeing on a cop car while publicly intoxicated, I don’t think that should be a factor when your 45 applying for a job after going to college, having a family, having a 20 year career, etc. I'd go further and say a lot of charges and convictions shouldn't be a matter of public record that everyone can look up in the first place, at least not with a trivial index. File the court judgement and other documentation under a case number, ban reindexing by third parties (AI scrapers, "background check" services) entirely. That way, anyone interested can still go and review court judgements for glaring issues, but a "pissed on a patrol car" conviction won't hinder that person's employment perspectives forever. In Germany for example, we have something called the Führungszeugnis - a certificate by the government showing that you haven't been convicted of a crime that warranted more than three months of imprisonment or the equivalent in monthly earning as a financial fine. Most employers don't even request that, only employers in security-sensitive environments, public service or anything to do with children (the latter get a certificate also including a bunch of sex pest crimes in the query).
- piperswe 8mo ago
  The UK has common law: the outcomes of previous court cases and the arguments therein determine what the law is. It’s important that court records be public then, because otherwise there’s no way to tell what the law is.

kittbuilds 8mo ago

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jjk166 8mo ago

> Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? You're conflating two distinct issues - access to information, and making bad decisions based on that information. Blocking access to the information is the wrong way to deal with this problem. > a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that would otherwise have been expunged after a few years. This would be a perfect example of something which should be made open after a delay. If the information is expunged before the delay, there's nothing to make open.

closewith 8mo ago
> Blocking access to the information is the wrong way to deal with this problem. That's an assertion, but what's your reasoning? > This would be a perfect example of something which should be made open after a delay. If the information is expunged before the delay, there's nothing to make open. All across the EU, that information would be available immediately to journalists under exemptions for the Processing of Personal Data Solely for Journalistic Purposes, but would be simultaneously unlawful for any AI company to process for any other purposes (unless they had another legal basis like a Government contract).
autoexec 8mo ago
> Blocking access to the information is the wrong way to deal with this problem. Blocking (or more accurately: restricting) access works pretty well for many other things that we know will be used in ways that are harmful. Historically, just having to go in person to a court house and request to view records was enough to keep most people from abusing the public information they had. It's perfectly valid to say that we want information accessible, but not accessible over the internet or in AI datasets. What do you think the "right way" to deal with the problem is because we already know that "hope that people choose to be better/smarter/more respectful" isn't going work.
- jjk166 8mo ago
  > Blocking (or more accurately: restricting) access works pretty well for many other things that we know will be used in ways that are harmful. Historically, just having to go in person to a court house and request to view records was enough to keep most people from abusing the public information they had. If all you care about is preventing the information from being abused, preventing it from being used is a great option. This has significant negative side effects though. For court cases it means a lack of accountability for the justice system, excessive speculation in the court of public opinion, social stigma and innuendo, and the use of inappropriate proxies in lieu of good data. The fact that the access speedbump which supposedly worked in the past is no longer good enough is proof that an access speedbump is not a good way to do it. Let's say we block internet access but keep in person records access in place. What's to stop Google or anyone else from hiring a person to go visit the brick and mortar repositories to get the data exactly the same way they sent cars to map all the streets? Anything that makes it hard for giant companies is going to make it hard for the common person. And why are we making the assumption that AI training on this data is a net social ill? While we can certainly imagine abuses, it's not hard to imagine real benefits today, nonetheless unforeseen benefits someone more clever than us will come up with in the future. > What do you think the "right way" to deal with the problem is because we already know that "hope that people choose to be better/smarter/more respectful" isn't going work. We've been dealing with people making bad decisions from data forever. As an example, there was red lining where institutions would refuse to sell homes or guarantee loans for minorities. Sometimes they would use computer models which didn't track skin color but had some proxy for it. At the end of the day you can't stop this problem by trying to hide what race people are. You need to explicitly ban that behavior. And we did. Institutions that attempt it are vulnerable to both investigation by government agencies and liability to civil suit from their victims. It's not perfect, there are still abuses, but it's so much better than if we all just closed our eyes and pretended that if the data were harder to get the discrimination wouldn't happen. If you don't want algorithms to come to spurious and discriminatory conclusions, you must make algorithms auditable, and give the public reasonable access to interrogate these algorithms that impact them. If an AI rejects my loan application, you better be able to prove that the AI isn't doing so based on my skin color. If you can do that, you should also be able to prove it's not doing so based off an expunged record. If evidence comes out that the AI has been using such data to come to such decisions, those who made it and those who employ it should be liable for damages, and depending on factors like intent, adherence to best practices, and severity potentially face criminal prosecution. Basically AI should be treated exactly the same as a human using the same data to come to the same conclusion.

DebtDeflation 8mo ago

Totally agree. And it goes beyond criminal history. Just because I choose to make a dataset publicly available doesn't mean I want some AI memorizing it and using it to generate profit.

naasking 8mo ago
Publishing something publicly means readers can do anything they want with the knowledge they gained from it. They just can't redistribute it verbatim due to copyright.

yxhuvud 8mo ago

What we do here in sweden is that you can ask the courts for any court document (unless it is confidential for some reason). But the courts are allowed to do it conditionally, so a common condition if you ask for a lot of cases is to condition it to redact any PII before making the data searchable. Having the effect that people that actually care and know what to look for, can find information. But you can't randomly just search for someone and see what you get. There is also a second registry separate from the courts that used to keep track of people that have been convicted during the last n years that is used for backgrounds checks etc.

slashdev 8mo ago

AI isn't the problem here. Once something goes on the internet it lives forever (or should be treated as such). So has it always been. If something is expungable it probably shouldn't be public record. Otherwise it should be open and scrapable and ingested by both search engines and AI.

ivan_gammel 8mo ago

Names and other PII can be replaced with aliases in bulk data, unsealed after ID verification on specific requests and within quotas. It’s not a big problem.

jdhahana 8mo ago

Thanks, it’s super refreshing to hear this take. I fear where we are headed. I robbed a drug dealer some odd 15 years ago while strung out. No excuses, but I paid my debt (4-11 years in state max, did min) yet I still feel like a have this weight I can’t shake. I have worked for almost the whole time, am no longer on parole or probation. Paid all fines. I honestly felt terrible for what I did. At the time I had a promising career and a secret clearance. I still work in tech as a 1099 making way less than I should. But that is life. What does a background check matter when the first 20 links on Google is about me committing a robbery with a gun? Edit: mine is an extreme and violent case. But I humbly believe, to my benefit surely, that once I paid all debts it should be done. That is what the 8+ years of parole/probation/counseling was for.

Muromec 8mo ago

>Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks. Is this the UK thing where PII is part of the released dataset? I know that Ukrainian rulings are all public, but the PII is redacted, so you can train your AI on largely anonymized rulings. I think it should also be against GDPR to process sensitive PII like health records and criminal convictions without consent, but once it hits the public record, it's free to use.

itsthecourier 8mo ago

I know some countries that emit a "certificate of no judicial history", even when the citizen has so, if they ended the jail time I think this is wrong, it should be reported entirely at least for 5 years after the fact happened

hananova 8mo ago
The jail time is the entire punishment. To allow punishment to continue afterward is to invite recidivism.
- Muromec 8mo ago
  Jail time is not always the entire punishment, especially on the enlightened continent, where jail time is used sparingly. Keeping the conviction on record is a thing, because consecutive convictions often carry come with higher punishment. So depending on a crime cathegory, there is X years after which the record no longer counts, but it's not 0.

dmitrygr 8mo ago

> a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that would otherwise have been expunged after a few years. On the other hand, perpetrating crime is a GREAT predictor of perpetrating more crime -- in general most crime is perpetrated by past perps. Why should this info not be available to help others avoid troublemakers? https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/returning-prison-0 https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/returning-prison-0 https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/sex_offense_recidivism_2019.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/sex_offense_recidivism_2... https://usafacts.org/articles/how-common-is-it-for-released-prisoners-to-re-offend/ https://usafacts.org/articles/how-common-is-it-for-released-... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/ https://ciceroinstitute.org/research/the-case-for-incarceration/ https://ciceroinstitute.org/research/the-case-for-incarcerat... https://bjs.ojp.gov/topics/recidivism-and-reentry https://bjs.ojp.gov/topics/recidivism-and-reentry

bhawks 8mo ago

The actions of the government should always be publicly observable. This is what keeps it accountable. The fear that a person might be unfairly treated due to a long past indiscretion does not outweigh the public's right to observe and hold the government to account. Alternatively consider that you are assuming the worst behavior of the public and the best behavior of the government if you support this and it should be obvious the dangerous position this creates.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

roysting 8mo ago

Can you explain your reasoning about “forever convictions”, and for full disclosure, do you have a conviction and are thereby biased? Additionally, do you want a special class of privileged people, like a priestly class, who can interpret the data/bible for the peasantry? That mentality seems the same as that behind the old Latin bibles and Latin mass that people were abused to attend, even though they had no idea what was being said. So who would you bequeath the privileges of doing “research”?Only the true believers who believe what you believe so you wouldn’t have to be confronted with contradictions? And how would you prevent data exfiltration? Would you have your authorized “researchers” maybe go to a building, we can call it the Ministry of Truth, where they would have access to the information through telescreen terminals like how the DOJ is controlling the Epstein Files and then monitoring what the Congressmen were searching for? Think we would have discovered all we have discovered if only the Epstein people that rule the country had access to the Epstein files? Yes, convictions are permanent records of one’s offenses against society, especially the egregious offenses we call felonies on the USA. Should I as someone looking for a CFO or just an accountant not have the right that to know that someone was convicted of financial crimes, which is usually long precipitated by other transgressions and things like “mistakes” everyone knows weren’t mistakes? How would any professional association limit certification if that information is not accessible? So Madoff should Ave been able to get out and continue being involved in finances and investments? Please explain

AnthonyMouse 8mo ago

A thing can't simultaneously be public and not. There is no license to do research nor should there be, so if researchers can get it then anyone can. If it's not supposed to be public then don't publish it. If it's supposed to be public then stop trying to restrict it.

Ajedi32 8mo ago

If you commit a crime, get caught, and that makes people trust you less in the future, that's just the natural consequences of your own actions. No, I don't think if you shoplift as a teenager and get caught, charged, and convicted that automatically makes you a shoplifter for the rest of your life, but you also don't just get to wave a magic wand and make everyone forget you did what you did. You need to demonstrate you've changed and rebuild trust through your actions, and it's up to each individual person to decide whether they're convinced your trustworthy, not some government official with a delete button.

bell-cot 8mo ago

Before you even get to the "AI dataset ... forever-conviction" or copyright issues, you need to address AI's propensity to hallucinate when fed legal data and questions.

jalapenos 8mo ago

The crime having happened is forever. No-one is entitled to have it forcibly forgotten. That's up to other people to decide.

topherhunt 8mo ago

Jeez this seems totally backwards to me. I'd rather live in a society where court records are as open and public as safely possible (like GP's vision) and we as a society adjust our norms such that it's assholish and discriminatory to pass over someone for hiring just because they shoplifted when they were 15. There will for sure be major backlash against "permanent criminal" datasets (bringing up AI in this is a red herring, it's not fundamentally different from if someone were serving such a database using CGI scripts; AI just gives us more reach to do the things we were already committed to doing). But I frankly don't sympathize with the attitude that people should have the right to pretend that past decisions never happened. You also shouldn't be permanently _punished_ or _ostracized_ for your past self's decisions. But nor should you have the right to expect total anonymity / clean slate disconnected from your past self's decisions. My probably unpopular view: The right direction is for us as a society to recognize and acknowledge that people change and _need to be allowed to change_ -- not take the easy hack of erasing history. The cost for larger-scale public transparency & institutional change efforts is just too high.