4 ms·

>”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 fe

>”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.
  - macintux 8mo ago
    It should be possible to leverage previous case law without PII.
  - noirscape 8mo ago
    It should be possible to redact names from cases for that purpose.
  - fmbb 8mo ago
    That can be solved by migrating to a sensible legal system instead.
    - linksnapzz 8mo ago
      [flagged]
  - yxhuvud 8mo ago
    There are middle grounds - for example you could redact any PII before publishing it.
    - Muromec 8mo ago
      That's what Ukraine does, but I guess we have more resources to keep the digital stuff running properly and not outsource it to shadycorp.
  - mschuster91 8mo ago
    > It’s important that court records be public then, because otherwise there’s no way to tell what the law is. So anyone who is interested in determining if a specific behavior runs afoul of the law not just has to read through the law itself (which is, "thanks" to being a centuries old tradition, very hard to read) but also wade through court cases from in the worst case (very old laws dating to before the founding of the US) two countries. Frankly, that system is braindead. It worked back when it was designed as the body of law was very small - but today it's infeasible for any single human without the aid of sophisticated research tools.
whatsupdog 8mo ago
[flagged]
- cataphract 8mo ago
  We didn't? It must be a small minority of countries that dole out the same punishment for both.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- shigawire 8mo ago
  This is probably not the place for this discussion, good luck
- bmn__ 8mo ago
  [flagged]
notahacker 8mo ago
Also, courts record charges which are dismissed due to having no evidential basis whatsoever and statements which are deemed to be unreliable or even withdrawn. AI systems, particularly language models aggregating vast corpuses of data, are not always good at making these distinctions.
- mey 8mo ago
  That is a critical point that AI companies want to remove. _they_ want to be the system of record. Except they _can't_. Which makes me think of LLMs are just really bad cache layers on the world.
bko 8mo ago
> 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. That's up to the person for the particular role. Imagine hiring a nanny and some bureaucrat telling you what prior arrest is "relevant". No thanks. I'll make that call myself.
- nicoburns 8mo ago
  That's the reality in my country, and I think most European countries. And I'm very glad it is. The alternative is high recidivism rates because criminals who have served their time are unable access the basic resources they need (jobs, house) to live a normal life.
- Forgeties79 8mo ago
  No one is forcing you to hire formerly incarcerated nannies but you also aren’t entitled to everyone’s life story. I also don’t think this is the issue you’re making it out to be. Anyone who has “gotten in trouble” with kids is on a registry. Violent offenders don’t have their records so easily expunged. I’m curious what this group is (and how big they are) that you’re afraid of. I also think someone who has suffered a false accusation of that magnitude and fought to be exonerated shouldn’t be forced to suffer further.
- Muromec 8mo ago
  >That's up to the person for the particular role. Imagine hiring a nanny and some bureaucrat telling you what prior arrest is "relevant". No thanks. I'll make that call myself. Thanks, but I don't want to have violent people working as taxi drivers, pdf files in childcare and fraudsters in the banking system. Especially if somebody decided to not take this information into account. Good conduct certificates are there for a reason -- you ask the faceless bureaucrat to give you one for the narrow purpose and it's a binary result that you bring back to the employer.
  - dghlsakjg 8mo ago
    > pdf files Please don't unnecessarily censor yourself for the benefit of large social media companies. We can say pedophile here. We should be able to say pedophile anywhere. Pre-compliance to censorship is far worse than speaking plainly about these things, especially if you are using a homophone to mean the same thing.
dvdkon 8mo ago
That seems compatible with OP's suggestion, just with X being a large value like 100 years, so sensitive information is only published about dead people. At some point, personal information becomes history, and we stop caring about protecting the owner's privacy. The only thing we can disagree on is how long that takes.
- reactordev 8mo ago
  Right, except there are some cases where that information should be disclosed prior to their death. Sensitive positions, dealing with child care, etc. but those are specific circumstances that can go through a specific channel. Like we did with background checks. Now, AI is in charge and ANY record in ANY system is flagged. Whether it’s for a rental application, or a job, or a credit card.
andsoitis 8mo ago
> Not expunged or removed from record, just removed from any decision making. This made me pause. It seems to me that if something is not meant to inform decision making, then why does a record of it need to persist?
- neallindsay 8mo ago
  If someone is charged with and found innocent of a crime, you can't just remove that record. If someone else later finds an account of them being accused, they need a way to credibly assert that they were found innocent. Alternately if they are convicted and served their sentence, they might need to prove that in the future. Sometimes people are unfairly ostracized for their past, but I think a policy of deleting records will do more harm than good.
  - reactordev 8mo ago
    Or in the case of, down the road, repeating an offense. The judge sees you had an issue in the past, was good for a while, then repeated, suggesting an event or something has happened or that the individual has lost their motivation to stay reformed. Sentencing to time for the crime but then also being able to assist the individual in finding help to get them back on track. We have the systems in place to do this, we just don’t. Also, when applying for a loan, being a sex offender shouldn’t matter. When applying for a mortgage across the street from an elementary school, it should. The only way to have a system like that is to keep records, permanently, but decision making is limited.
    - Muromec 8mo ago
      >Also, when applying for a loan, being a sex offender shouldn’t matter. When applying for a mortgage across the street from an elementary school, it should. I'm not sure we can write that much more COBOL.
    - AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
      > Also, when applying for a loan, being a sex offender shouldn’t matter. When applying for a mortgage across the street from an elementary school, it should. Should it though? You can buy a piece of real estate without living there, e.g. because it's a rental property, or maybe the school is announced to be shutting down even though it hasn't yet. And in general this should have nothing to do with the bank; why should they care that somebody wants to buy a house they're not allowed to be in? Stop trying to get corporations to be the police. They're stupendously bad at it and it deprives people of the recourse they would have if the government was making the same mistake directly.
fao_ 8mo ago
> There needs to be a statute of limitations just like there is for reporting the crimes. The UK does not have a statute of limitations
- reactordev 8mo ago
  No? So I can report a petty theft from 35 years ago?
- iso1631 8mo ago
  The UK has multiple legal systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitation_Act_1980 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitation_Act_1980 Applies to England and Wales, I believe there are similar ones for Scotland and NI
charcircuit 8mo ago
The AI should decide if it's still relevant or not. People should fully understand that their actions reflect their character and this should influence them to always do the right thing.
- vimda 8mo ago
  I find this a weird take. Are you saying you _want_ unaccountable and profit driven third party companies to become quasi-judicial arbiters of justice?
  - charcircuit 8mo ago
    I am saying that it is not good if you had to hide information about yourself in order to get hired. Justice is provided by the courts.
    - vimda 8mo ago
      Right, and the court decides wether that information is relevant anymore. You're suggesting we take that ability and give it to random third parties
    - Mordisquitos 8mo ago
      > Justice is provided by the courts. Indeed. And as far as I know, "courts" is not an alternative spelling of "AI".
      - charcircuit 8mo ago
        The scenario we are talking about is AI having access to court records. The courts make rulings and then the AI works off of those.
    - lazyasciiart 8mo ago
      So you’re all for photos on job applications then? That’s information about you.

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.
- macintux 8mo ago
  It should be possible to leverage previous case law without PII.
- noirscape 8mo ago
  It should be possible to redact names from cases for that purpose.
- fmbb 8mo ago
  That can be solved by migrating to a sensible legal system instead.
  - linksnapzz 8mo ago
    [flagged]
- yxhuvud 8mo ago
  There are middle grounds - for example you could redact any PII before publishing it.
  - Muromec 8mo ago
    That's what Ukraine does, but I guess we have more resources to keep the digital stuff running properly and not outsource it to shadycorp.
- mschuster91 8mo ago
  > It’s important that court records be public then, because otherwise there’s no way to tell what the law is. So anyone who is interested in determining if a specific behavior runs afoul of the law not just has to read through the law itself (which is, "thanks" to being a centuries old tradition, very hard to read) but also wade through court cases from in the worst case (very old laws dating to before the founding of the US) two countries. Frankly, that system is braindead. It worked back when it was designed as the body of law was very small - but today it's infeasible for any single human without the aid of sophisticated research tools.

whatsupdog 8mo ago

[flagged]

cataphract 8mo ago
We didn't? It must be a small minority of countries that dole out the same punishment for both.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
shigawire 8mo ago
This is probably not the place for this discussion, good luck
bmn__ 8mo ago
[flagged]

notahacker 8mo ago

Also, courts record charges which are dismissed due to having no evidential basis whatsoever and statements which are deemed to be unreliable or even withdrawn. AI systems, particularly language models aggregating vast corpuses of data, are not always good at making these distinctions.

mey 8mo ago
That is a critical point that AI companies want to remove. _they_ want to be the system of record. Except they _can't_. Which makes me think of LLMs are just really bad cache layers on the world.

bko 8mo ago

> 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. That's up to the person for the particular role. Imagine hiring a nanny and some bureaucrat telling you what prior arrest is "relevant". No thanks. I'll make that call myself.

nicoburns 8mo ago
That's the reality in my country, and I think most European countries. And I'm very glad it is. The alternative is high recidivism rates because criminals who have served their time are unable access the basic resources they need (jobs, house) to live a normal life.
Forgeties79 8mo ago
No one is forcing you to hire formerly incarcerated nannies but you also aren’t entitled to everyone’s life story. I also don’t think this is the issue you’re making it out to be. Anyone who has “gotten in trouble” with kids is on a registry. Violent offenders don’t have their records so easily expunged. I’m curious what this group is (and how big they are) that you’re afraid of. I also think someone who has suffered a false accusation of that magnitude and fought to be exonerated shouldn’t be forced to suffer further.
Muromec 8mo ago
>That's up to the person for the particular role. Imagine hiring a nanny and some bureaucrat telling you what prior arrest is "relevant". No thanks. I'll make that call myself. Thanks, but I don't want to have violent people working as taxi drivers, pdf files in childcare and fraudsters in the banking system. Especially if somebody decided to not take this information into account. Good conduct certificates are there for a reason -- you ask the faceless bureaucrat to give you one for the narrow purpose and it's a binary result that you bring back to the employer.
- dghlsakjg 8mo ago
  > pdf files Please don't unnecessarily censor yourself for the benefit of large social media companies. We can say pedophile here. We should be able to say pedophile anywhere. Pre-compliance to censorship is far worse than speaking plainly about these things, especially if you are using a homophone to mean the same thing.

dvdkon 8mo ago

That seems compatible with OP's suggestion, just with X being a large value like 100 years, so sensitive information is only published about dead people. At some point, personal information becomes history, and we stop caring about protecting the owner's privacy. The only thing we can disagree on is how long that takes.

reactordev 8mo ago
Right, except there are some cases where that information should be disclosed prior to their death. Sensitive positions, dealing with child care, etc. but those are specific circumstances that can go through a specific channel. Like we did with background checks. Now, AI is in charge and ANY record in ANY system is flagged. Whether it’s for a rental application, or a job, or a credit card.

andsoitis 8mo ago

> Not expunged or removed from record, just removed from any decision making. This made me pause. It seems to me that if something is not meant to inform decision making, then why does a record of it need to persist?

neallindsay 8mo ago
If someone is charged with and found innocent of a crime, you can't just remove that record. If someone else later finds an account of them being accused, they need a way to credibly assert that they were found innocent. Alternately if they are convicted and served their sentence, they might need to prove that in the future. Sometimes people are unfairly ostracized for their past, but I think a policy of deleting records will do more harm than good.
- reactordev 8mo ago
  Or in the case of, down the road, repeating an offense. The judge sees you had an issue in the past, was good for a while, then repeated, suggesting an event or something has happened or that the individual has lost their motivation to stay reformed. Sentencing to time for the crime but then also being able to assist the individual in finding help to get them back on track. We have the systems in place to do this, we just don’t. Also, when applying for a loan, being a sex offender shouldn’t matter. When applying for a mortgage across the street from an elementary school, it should. The only way to have a system like that is to keep records, permanently, but decision making is limited.
  - Muromec 8mo ago
    >Also, when applying for a loan, being a sex offender shouldn’t matter. When applying for a mortgage across the street from an elementary school, it should. I'm not sure we can write that much more COBOL.
  - AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
    > Also, when applying for a loan, being a sex offender shouldn’t matter. When applying for a mortgage across the street from an elementary school, it should. Should it though? You can buy a piece of real estate without living there, e.g. because it's a rental property, or maybe the school is announced to be shutting down even though it hasn't yet. And in general this should have nothing to do with the bank; why should they care that somebody wants to buy a house they're not allowed to be in? Stop trying to get corporations to be the police. They're stupendously bad at it and it deprives people of the recourse they would have if the government was making the same mistake directly.

fao_ 8mo ago

> There needs to be a statute of limitations just like there is for reporting the crimes. The UK does not have a statute of limitations

reactordev 8mo ago
No? So I can report a petty theft from 35 years ago?
iso1631 8mo ago
The UK has multiple legal systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitation_Act_1980 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitation_Act_1980 Applies to England and Wales, I believe there are similar ones for Scotland and NI

charcircuit 8mo ago

The AI should decide if it's still relevant or not. People should fully understand that their actions reflect their character and this should influence them to always do the right thing.

vimda 8mo ago
I find this a weird take. Are you saying you _want_ unaccountable and profit driven third party companies to become quasi-judicial arbiters of justice?
- charcircuit 8mo ago
  I am saying that it is not good if you had to hide information about yourself in order to get hired. Justice is provided by the courts.
  - vimda 8mo ago
    Right, and the court decides wether that information is relevant anymore. You're suggesting we take that ability and give it to random third parties
  - Mordisquitos 8mo ago
    > Justice is provided by the courts. Indeed. And as far as I know, "courts" is not an alternative spelling of "AI".
    - charcircuit 8mo ago
      The scenario we are talking about is AI having access to court records. The courts make rulings and then the AI works off of those.
  - lazyasciiart 8mo ago
    So you’re all for photos on job applications then? That’s information about you.