Publicdata.com - Imagine my shock when they were reporting that I had a criminal conviction for AGGRAVATED SEXUAL ASSAULT in a county I'd never even lived in and had only traveled through a very few times in my life!

Publicdata.com - Imagine my shock when they were reporting that I had a criminal conviction for AGGRAVATED SEXUAL ASSAULT in a county I'd never even lived in and had only traveled through a very few times in my life!

Publicdata.com

Okay, here's one that I think most reasonable people would find outrageous...

I subscribed to Publicdata.com back on 14 April 2004. This is a "third party" resource for providing information to the public on individuals' driver's license, voter registration, and criminal record data, just to name a few areas. The subscription cost is $25 per year for 250 "lookups". Just for grins, I ran my own name through their database to see if all my personal data was accurate and up-to-date.

Imagine my shock when they were reporting that I had a criminal conviction for AGGRAVATED SEXUAL ASSAULT in a county I'd never even lived in and had only traveled through a very few times in my life! Moreover, I have a rather unique name and it would be impossible to share the name with someone else, and after researching driver license and other public records, there was, in fact, no other person in Texas who shared my name. I didn't email them, but called them directly to demand where they had gotten this outrageous information.

A man named Miguel told me that it MUST be correct, because they got all their information directly from the Texas Department of Public Safety. Naturally, my next step was to pay out of my own pocket the fee necessary to access the Texas DPS database. As I expected, there was NOTHING in their website indicating that I had any such conviction. My next step was to contact my attorney and explain the situation. She said that there was, in fact, grounds here for a civil suit if they did not remove the information from their website, but to first give them the opportunity to do just that before we took any legal action. I called back to Publicdata.com and spoke again to Miguel. He said that he would "research" it and promised to email me within 24 hours. I checked my email inbox diligently. Nothing.

I waited several more days before I called back and demanded to speak to Miguel. He nonchalantly hemmed and hawed around saying that his programers just weren't getting back to him with any information. He promised (nonchalantly) that he would email me before the day was over with the status of his "investigation", and if he had not heard from his programmer by the end of the day, it would be early the next morning. I checked my email......nothing. Throughout this entire process, Miguel's attitude was that of incredulity toward my claims...that I was indeed guilty of the offense, but was just trying to get him to remove the entry from his website. It became clear to me that he had no intention of initiating any investigation and was just engaging in a classic job of "blowing me off".

To date, 6/7/04, I have spoken with Miguel at Publicdata.com a total of three times over a six week period. Every promise he has made to get back to me on the status of my grievance has been broken. I have an appointment with my attorney this week. The erroneous entry in Publicdata.com WILL be removed...at their expense. Meanwhile, I encourage anyone who reads this to run a check on themselves in Publicdata.com to see if there are any erroneous entries such as mine. It could have very damaging implications for you if anyone were to see it.

craig h

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