Comment by reactordev
5 days 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.
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are dismissed due to having no evidential basis whatsoever and statements which are deemed to be unreliable or even withdrawn.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.
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.
> 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.
Many countries have solved this with a special background check. In Canada we call this a "vulnerable sector check," [1] and it's usually required for roles such as childcare, education, healthcare, etc. Unlike standard background checks, which do not turn up convictions which have received record suspensions (equivalent to a pardon), these ones do flag cases such as sex offenses, even if a record suspension was issued.
They are only available for vulnerable sectors, you can't ask for one as a convenience store owner vetting a cashier. But if you are employing child care workers in a daycare, you can get them.
This approach balances the need for public safety against the ex-con's need to integrate back into society.
[1] https://rcmp.ca/en/criminal-records/criminal-record-checks/v...
Why are only some sectors "vulnerable" and who is to make that call? How about the person cooking my food?
You're over-thinking it, trying to solve for a problem that doesn't exist. No one has a "right" to work for me. There's plenty of roles that accept ex-cons and orgs that actively hire them.
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In the UK the equivalent is a DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) check.
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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.
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.
Then before I give you my business or hire you, I also want to know that you are the kind of person that thinks they have a right to any other person's entire life, so I can hold it against you and prevent you from benefitting from all your other possible virtues and afforts.
So I likewise, require to know everything about you, including things that are none of my business but I just think they are my business and that's what matters. I'll make that call myself.
You terms are acceptable. I'll put a sign out on my business that says "none of our employees have criminal records".
Note you are free to advertise hiring prior offenders.
You can also look up business ownership details and see if they have criminal records as well.
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> 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.
Well, no ; that's not up to you. While you may be interested in this information, the government also has a responsibility to protect the subject of that information.
The tradeoff was maintained by making the information available, but not without friction. That tradeoff is being shattered by third parties changing the amount of friction required to get the information. Logically, the government reacts by removing the information. It's not as good as it used to be, but it's better than the alternative.
What criminal records do you have? Please provide a way to verify. Until then, you cannot be trusted in any capacity.
> I'll make that call myself.
This is why this needs to be regulated.
>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.
> 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.
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> 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).
France has a similar system to the German Führungszeugnis. Our criminal record (casier judiciaire) has 3 tiers: B1 (full record, only accessible by judges), B2 (accessible by some employers like government or childcare), and B3 (only serious convictions, the only one you can request yourself). Most employers never see anything. It works fine, recidivism stays manageable, and people actually get second chances. The US system of making everything googleable forever is just setting people up to fail.
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.
It is the outcome of appellate court cases and arguments that determine law in common law jurisdictions, not the output of trial courts. Telling what the law is in a common law system would not be affected if trial court records were unavailable to the public. You only actually need appellate court records publicly available for determining the law.
The appellate court records would contain information from the trial court records, but most of the identifying information of the parties could be redacted.
There are middle grounds - for example you could redact any PII before publishing it.
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It should be possible to redact names from cases for that purpose.
It should be possible to leverage previous case law without PII.
> 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.
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That can be solved by migrating to a sensible legal system instead.
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> 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?
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.
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.
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Nobody is found innocent in UK courts.
You are found Guilty or confirmed you continue to be Not Guilty.
In Scotland there was also the verdict "not proven" but that's no longer the case for new trials
> If someone else later finds an account of them being accused, they need a way to credibly assert that they were found innocent.
At the heart of Western criminal law is the principle: You are presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
Western systems do not formally declare someone "innocent".
A trial can result in two outcomes: Guilty or Not Guilty (acquittal). Note that the latter does not mean the person was proven innocent.
> 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.
Couldn't they just point to the court system's computer showing zero convictions? If it shows guilty verdicts then showing none is already proof there are none.
Historical record, as one example. We gain considerable value from official records from the past, why would our descendents be any different?
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.
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.
> 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
The UK has multiple legal systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitation_Act_1980
Applies to England and Wales, I believe there are similar ones for Scotland and NI
No? So I can report a petty theft from 35 years 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.
> People should fully understand that their actions reflect their character
As if "character" was some kind of immutable attribute you are born with.
The way you are raised has a big impact on how you act the rest of your life. There is signal in this information, not just noise.
It mostly is. People really do have personalities.
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> People should fully understand that their actions reflect their character and this should influence them to always do the right thing.
Shame the same standards don’t apply to the people running the government.
> The AI should decide
That is a great recipe for systematic discrimination.
The whole goal of a hiring pipeline is to create a system to discriminate from a ton of candidates to good people to hire.
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?
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.
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We didn't? It must be a small minority of countries that dole out the same punishment for both.
This is probably not the place for this discussion, good luck
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