Do you hear that sucking sound? Music companies want every last coin you have. So does Hollywood. Now, Yahoo has a pay-per-view service: Yahoo to launch pay-per-search

Nice, agencies use databases that are not accurate. Nor are people even aware of the data or have access to change or dispute the data. Lovely. Source: Unregulated databases hold personal data

In the 2000 presidential election, Florida disqualified thousands of voters because a computerized database search identified them as felons who were ineligible to participate in the election.

Many of those voters weren’t, in fact, felons. They had been charged with misdemeanor crimes and should have been eligible to vote.

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DBT employees told Florida officials they would get precisely the types of incorrect results DBT did with the kind of query they ran, said Lee.

“Florida knew and said ‘OK,’ because supervisors would [manually] double-check [the query results]. But that never happened,” Lee said. By law, county commissioners are required to do those checks.

ChoicePoint maintains databases of public records, such as court documents and property records, which 7,500 law enforcement agencies across the U.S. use to help in their investigations. Private businesses, such as insurance companies, also use them to conduct fraud mitigation and background checks, Lee said.

Because information is often incorrect in the source documents, Lee said, it would be appropriate for regulation like the Fair Credit Reporting Act. That law lets individuals review their credit reports and submit requests for changes. ChoicePoint, however, isn’t regulated by the act.