US knowledge dealer LexisNexis has allegedly violated privateness and client safety rights in Illinois by accumulating and mixing intensive private data on folks with out their consent and promoting it to a spread of third events, together with federal immigration authorities, in line with a lawsuit filed by immigrants’ rights teams.
LexisNexis, though finest referred to as a authorized analysis instrument, is likely one of the world’s greatest aggregators of non-public and business knowledge, amassing hundreds of thousands of information that it sells on to hundreds of personal corporations, authorities our bodies and legislation enforcement companies.
Filed on 16 August within the Circuit Court docket of Prepare dinner County by 4 immigration advocacy teams – Simply Futures Regulation, Authorized Motion Chicago, Mijente, and Organized Communities Towards Deportations (OCAD) – the lawsuit additional alleges that LexisNexis’s knowledge assortment practices assist to facilitate authorities surveillance and monitoring of protestors, immigrants, and different communities of color.
“LexisNexis sells customers’ knowledge by means of a web based platform it calls Accurint,” says the 33-page grievance. “Accurint presents an encyclopedic abstract of an individual’s existence; its database aggregates each public and personal data and accommodates profiles on hundreds of thousands of individuals.
“This data consists of names, addresses, emails, prison histories, telephone numbers, previous jobs, former marriages, relations, associates, motorcar data, bankruptcies, liens, judgments, actual property information, social media data, and enterprise and employment data. A lot of this knowledge is drawn from day-to-day client transactions.”
The grievance says the agency’s expertise “poses a grave menace to civil liberties” as a result of, by means of the usage of Accurint, legislation enforcement officers can “surveil and observe folks based mostly on data that these officers wouldn’t, in lots of instances, in any other case be capable to receive with out a subpoena, courtroom order, or different authorized course of”. It provides: “The officers who’ve entry to this knowledge embrace Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) staff.”
The grievance additional particulars how LexisNexis “makes important income” from its assortment, aggregation and sale of individuals’s private figuring out data by charging customers for every element of Accurint’s search capabilities, and providing “tailor-made subscription plans for legislation enforcement, authorities companies, legislation corporations, personal investigators, insurers, healthcare organisations and collections companies, respectively.”
In April 2021, The Intercept reported that LexisNexis had signed a $16.8m contract to promote data to ICE. Separate paperwork obtained by Simply Futures Regulation through a freedom of knowledge request revealed that ICE searched LexisNexis’s database greater than one million occasions, producing greater than 300,000 reviews, within the six months between March and September 2021.
“Potential ICE makes use of of information dealer expertise embrace figuring out immigration standing, figuring out present dwelling handle or location in an effort to conduct raids/arrests, and studying about immigrants’ households by means of their associations,” says the grievance. “Upon data and perception, ICE has used Accurint for every of those functions, and extra.
“Accurint permits ICE to conduct arbitrary digital searches of plaintiffs, their members, and different Illinois residents, immediately accessing their delicate private knowledge with out privateness safeguards, warrants, or a displaying of reasonableness. Additional, inaccuracies plaguing the expertise enhance the danger of misidentification.”
Pc Weekly contacted LexisNexis in regards to the lawsuit and its contract with ICE, however was instructed the corporate was unable to touch upon pending litigation.
In a Q&A on its web site relating to the ICE contract, LexisNexis mentioned that the expertise “is strictly used for figuring out people with severe prison backgrounds” and to not observe those that might have dedicated minor offences.
It added: “Any suggestion that the instrument is an instrument to assist separate households on the border is fake. The instrument promotes public security and isn’t used to stop authorized immigration, neither is it used to take away people from the US until they pose a severe menace to public security, together with little one trafficking, drug smuggling and different severe prison exercise.”
Commenting on the lawsuit, Sejal Zota, authorized director of Simply Futures Now, mentioned: “It’s deeply alarming how the federal government is exploiting authorized loopholes to acquire America’s most delicate data with out a warrant, subpoenas, or any authorized course of by any means. LexisNexis’s unethical practices because the intermediary for ICE assist the deportation and separation of our immigrant group members – and we intend to place a cease to it.”
Antonio Gutierrez, a strategic coordinator for OCAD, added: “We’ve immediately skilled how surveillance, knowledge assortment, and interactions with legislation enforcement lead to mass incarceration and terrorisation of our group. LexisNexis is violating people’ privateness rights by offering addresses, telephone numbers, relations’ names and extra by means of the info being bought to companies like ICE with out their permission.”