It isn't just police. I have a somewhat common American name. A bank once opened a signature loan for one of my 4 or so same-state doppelgangers and sent me the payment coupons. One of the doppelgangers is a felon, which sucks for background checks and also because I love to travel and therefore always end up with an 'X' from the APC kiosk. Post-Trump, this means about an hour of detention in Miami while a lady questions me in Spanish until finally they realize we have different birthdays and physical descriptions. They told me it would stop if I got Global Entry. It didn't.
This could all be prevented. These organizations are just flat-out negligent and don't care.
I also have a common name. I was once called to the principal's office, where I, confused, started to receive a lecture.
THEY: <confusing nonsense>
I: What are you talking about?
THEY: You know what I'm talking about. Don't play dumb.
I: (after 10 seconds of thought) How many people named $NAME attend this school?
THEY: <checking records>
THEY: ... Two. Get back to class! Now!
No apology. No sign of contrition. They acted like it was my fault that they screwed up. If it had ever happened more than once, I certainly would have raised some hell over it.
They truly do not care. If there is a problem, it is your fault, for being an inconveniently irregular person. I shudder to think at how many of us would be inconvenienced if any one of the other people than share my name and birthdate were disreputable or notorious among certain government agencies.
Anecdotally, municipal and circuit court judges could care less about whether you get treated fairly or not, so long as your case does not make their job even one iota more difficult. You could do 110% of their work for them, and they still might rule capriciously, telling you to appeal if you don't like it.
The thing that pissed me off most about the article was the innocent party pleading guilty and paying fines. It made me want to leap through my screen and scream at her in person.
Being a victim doesn't mean you can't also do something scream-worthy on its own merits while that is happening.
I'd like to scream at everyone who pleads guilty to something they know they didn't do. I'd also like to scream at people who take a confidential settlement that allows the other party to continue avoiding ultimate accountability for their actions, possibly creating victims of other people in the future.
They may have valid personal reasons for doing it, but "seeking an outcome better for me at the expense of everyone else" is not a strategy that engenders a lot of sympathy in me.
We cannot say for certain what would have happened if she had done something other than the thing she actually did.
I have a common name, and some jobs that required background checks, and the most I have ever had to do regarding felons with similar names to my own is sign a note saying that none of those people were me.
If I were in her situation today, I would ask the company for the mailing address of its corporate attorney, and go from there.
"Either I'm the dictator of North Korea traveling incognito and without an entourage in which case you should treat me as having diplomatic immunity and send me on my way or contact the US State Department, or I'm obviously not the dictator of North Korea and I've probably had enough trouble in my life already because of the matching name and you should send me on my way."
"By the way, if you contact the State Department they're probably going to laugh at you."
> Even though he was clearly alive and well and way taller
That's not relevant, because they probably weren't suspecting him of being the Supreme Leader, they were suspecting him of having a reason to conceal his identity (or possibly of being mentally ill).
Right. My first instinct when I want to conceal my identity is to assume the pseudonym Kim Jong Il. Helps keep a low profile. /s
As per your comment that it could be indicative of his mental health, I would bet my bottom dollar that this is baseless speculation, with no basis in actual research of the behavioral patterns of the mentally ill.
In short, par for the TSA course: thrash blindly around in the dark, catching no one, inconveniencing everyone to remind us all of how important they are.
It's pretty sad that my email address is a better unique identifier than most of the values the government tries to use.
I suppose it's an incentives thing - if I give different emails for different events, that's a problem for the government. If they have multiple people 'assigned' to my name and birthdate, that's my problem. But it's still damned sad that they're using an identifier which isn't even close to unique for topics this important.
I regularly get notices for children's sports leagues, drugs available for pickup at pharmacy, updates to apartment rental procedures, etc. for others who believe they have my email address. All because I have a simple first.last@gmail.com address, rather than something with goofy numbers appended.
I've been dealing something similar for years now. There is a guy out there who thinks that his email address is firstlast@gmail.com, however I've had the first.last@gmail.com version of the address from back before google decided that the dots didn't matter any more.
It appears to me that google merged the addresses but he still continues to use the dotless address when signing up for things.
It amazes me that he thinks it works, surely none of the email ever gets to it?
I've tracked him down on facebook and got a message to him via his wife.... but it continues to happen. Which makes me wonder if somehow sometimes it does work for him?
Are you sure that google ever "merged" the dot and non-dot versions? As I recall (and I remember finding about that dots don't matter over a decade ago), it was like this since gmail launched?
It's a case of bad incentives: nobody is going to lose his job because they harass you, but somebody is going to suffer if a felon somehow goes through unmolested and then proceeds to do something that local newspapers might report.
Why isn't the NYPD and DMV using the driver's license number for ID? It's a unique number and can help avoid situations like this. I would understand the confusion when the perpetrator of the crime doesn't have a license and they just provide a name, DOB, and address but some of these tickets were for people that have a license. It seems like using the license number for ID is a no brainer.
Let me rephrase: why isn't the DMV and the NYPD liable for the damage caused by their actions?
Of course you're going to get a bureaucracy Kafka would be proud of if it doesn't have to face any consequences for actions it takes.
If the police had to indemnify all parties for all damages (regardless of innocence - let the courts assign fines, not the police), they'd be reorganized with saner policies in a heartbeat.
As is... well, they should rename Russian roulette.
> Let me rephrase: why isn't the DMV and the NYPD liable for the damage caused by their actions?
Exactly my thoughts while reading this. I mean just think about it: Given a nation that spans half a continent, you're bound to have two people with the same name and birth date living in the same state occasionally. HOW THE HELL can a justice system then assume that those two things are enough for a unique identification?
It boggles my mind that they would invalidate one person's driver license for another one's misdeeds. Don't they link those to something unique? You have mandatory social security numbers, right?
So, you have to have some pressure on the according actors so they do their job correctly. Reading about that judge made the whole thing even more bizarre. There's someone judging people without having their identity confirmed properly first? WTF?
Edit: I had a similar experience lately with my ISP. Okay, in that case, I get that it can happen - and funnily enough, I haven't talked to a single boneheaded person while dealing with this. But in a justice system? No way!
He was a highly valued part of a very large bureaucracy. He did keep the job and presumably liked it: but he knew from the inside what was possible when the job wasn't done well.
Why doesn't the NYPD take a picture of the person, license, and car when they issue a ticket? Cameras are now really cheap and that would help solve problems with mistaken or forged identities.
Because there is probably no system in place to get that photo in the hands of anyone relevant to the case.
Think of the DMV like mcdonalds. The staff there is trained on how to perform a specific set of tasks and the task she needs completed is not something anyone there has been trained to do. It would probably involve a major Information Technology overhaul to change how their computer systems and filing records work and millions of dollars to be approved by NY state legislature and multiple bid contracts, etc. They don't keep people on staff that know how to fix issues they didn't conceive of ahead of time.
Maybe it isn't legal? I'm pretty sure there is a law preventing use of social security numbers for some things, so there may be something similar happening here. I don't really know, and I'd also guess something like that would vary by state.
I really don't understand US's use of SSN. You people treat it as a secret while it isn't. Now this is a place while something like SSN would've helped but NYPD still uses the old name+D.O.B. combination for checks. US is basically using a very insecure method of national identity. Maybe US should just go ahead and implement a real National Identity Program now.
Any move to make an official national identity program in the USA is demonized and shot on sight, no matter if it brings to light the crappy system around SSNs.
A true solution would have to be usable by private industry as well. If it were up to me, it would essentially be x509 (because today, you're trusting the state and the person presenting the SSN), but people lose important shit, even proof of identity, all the time.
In Belgium we receive a national ID chip card which can be used as a PIN-protected client certificate on websites, including all government sites. Identity theft is pretty much impossible unless someone physically steals your ID.
I never understood the privacy concern that americans have about a national ID card when the government knows all the same things about them, and can abuse it in all the same ways. It's like having all the downsides of a national ID, without the upside of being protected against identity theft.
My best attempt at explaining, although this particular issue isn't one I feel all that strongly about: It's not that we're against the practical idea of a national ID card, it's that we're against giving the federal government the authority that would be necessary to mandate such a thing. We're willing to live with the inefficiency to keep federalism intact.
There's an inbuilt distrust of the federal government built into the constitution itself and there's a constant drumbeat from the Republican side that the federal government is wasteful and out of touch with the needs of the individual states, often for practical purposes of devolving control of funding and policy to the state level where in general they have more control.
And as to why the SSN is the way it is, it's a usage of convenience. Before the SSN there was no unique identifier for every citizen then suddenly to keep track of the new entitlement and assistance programs during the great depression one was created and companies started using it as they wanted because it was the most convenient uuid available. There's a good recent CGP Grey video about the history of SSN and why it's such a silly mess today.
The answer is, Americans are often fearful people about irrational things. (I am one, and I get into arguments all the time with friends about their irrational fears of the gubmint, terriss, communiss, you name it.)
Keeping us afraid is good business for a lot of low-rent grift industries, like doomsday preppers, as well as high-level ones, like the military industrial complex.
That's kind of how it works in Europe - state keeps the records and assigns you a number (citizen Id, tax Id whatever), and you can use x509, possibly from private providers, to prove that it's you.
Obviously that Id can't be kept secret.
In Ukraine we even have an opt out for crazy Russian churchgoers who believe, that having id is literally selling their soul - they just use passport number in their x509 certs.
Unfortunately, US politics are really weird and unlikely to get better without at least a constitutional amendment or two. We're stuck unable (unwilling...) to avoid all kinds of awful things necessary for participation in a modern economy, but able to squash any government-related approaches to mitigate the awfulness. This includes simple stuff like national ID.
We must have something like unique individual IDs, but a significant faction of political actors don't want it, so nothing official exists. Instead we get terrible, insecure, miserable-to-deal-with, ad hoc, de facto national IDs of various kinds. It's the worst of both worlds—no actual extra freedom, lots of pointless inconvenience, expense, risk, and anxiety. If that last list looks like what our health care system produces, too, that's not an accident—this is the kind of situation our government (and their private partners) excel at creating.
It isn't now. But it used to be meant that way. I'm not sure what or how it started.
But old SSN cards had a line printed on them (on back, IIRC - probably not the best place) which read something like "For Social Security (or maybe IRS?) Use Only - Do Not Divulge".
That line has quietly disappeared (sometime before I was born - my Dad and my Mom's SSN cards had the line, but mine doesn't). Likely because the cat got outta the bag, and they realized it no longer mattered.
I imagine that it probably started with some company or other government agency deciding to use it without authorization of the SSN/IRS - and people went along with it because "it's the government, we can trust them", or some such malarky. Furthermore, most people probably never read the back of their card to find out that they weren't supposed to give that number out to just anyone, and of course no one thought of the potential implications to which that number could be applied.
This of course applies to any form of ID using a unique identifier: Bad actors in the system can easily exploit it - and when you are identified by a number, that number (and everything attached to it) is you - regardless of whether it really is or isn't.
Of course - all of this and more was covered in the book "Database Nation" - which was widely ignored.
I think the line you're referring to actually read "For social security and tax purposes - not for identification." As it was explained to me, it meant that the card itself was not a proof of identity, as opposed to something like a drivers license that had a picture and other identifying info.
In many countries it was originally illegal to ask for an SSN(equivalent) as identification; the line suggests that was originally true in the U.S. as well.
SSN used to be widely used for things like driver's license number. I'm sure it still happens here and there but it seems as if SSN isn't widely used outside of financial situations any longer.
It's still a slightly odd relic because I certainly would never want to depend on my SSN being secret. Even when used properly, that's still pretty wide usage.
When I was an undergraduate in the late 1980s, my university Id was my SSN. And because this was before the Web, professors would post exam scores on their office doors, with the id numbers as the identifiers (for privacy). It really was a different world.
Using the Driver's License ID for renewing one's Driver's License seems like one of the uses that would be approved, however. I mean, what else could they be using it for if not that?
Obviously SSN is treated as secret when it isn't. I've heard noises about re-issuing SSNs from deceased people, but didn't think it had happened. But is it not unique among living citizens? That's huge and I've never heard of it.
It appears that SSNs, as issued, are unique. But there are claims (which seem to be largely based from a study that some company called ID Analytics did about 10 years ago) that there may be millions of duplicate records because of identity theft, data entry errors, and people using the wrong number by accident.
> I had to plead guilty and pay the fine to restore my license, then try to repeal the guilty plea at traffic court.
Having to admit guilty when you didn't do it? What kind of system is that? Sounds like you are guilty until proven innocent in that case... instead of the other way around.
The issue is that she wanted to be able to drive before a (possibly months away) court date. Or that she wanted a job that needed her record clean within a week.
"Presumed innocent" means that at the _end_ of the trial, if the prosecution has not made their case then you are free. But in the time between being charged and the end of your trial you are not innocent. The court will suspend or revoke your license until after trial, you'll have all the charges on your record until after trial, and you can be held in prison until the trial is resolved. In all these cases, you will probably not get any compensation when it turns out that you were innocent, and meanwhile you may have been fired from work and had your property confiscated for non-payment of bills.
Because let's be honest, there's precious little to motivate for law enforcement, prosecutors and judges to actually process your case quickly; and indeed there are various incentives to convict possibly innocent parties. Similarly; there are virtually no incentives for law enforcement to do no harm; nor are there any meaningful protections against abuse of power. It is more common for police to do the punishing than courts at this point - which begs the question whether the very existence of a criminal court doesn't do more harm than good at this point; for by having such a facade of impartiality it becomes much easier to excuse lack of oversight, accountability and proportionality on the enforcement side.
Sure; it could be even worse. But is it too much to ask for at least some kind of self-corrective measure to be built into the system?
This happens all the time in the US, especially for poorer/disadvantaged folks. They'll be advised to plead guilty whether they did it or not because they'll be given a lighter punishment + be done with it instead of missing more work going to court and possibly still being found guilty.
Hell I did it and i'm white middle class, but I was actually guilty too so...
It's always hard to tell who would win a court case, but it seems to me like she would have lost that case. In general, it's hard to recover damages from honest mistakes, and doubly so when there was a procedure in place, and that procedure was followed.
In addition, driving in the US is a privilege rather than a right, so despite the fact that the majority of the US needs to drive to work, the burden of proof for revoking or suspending a drivers license is relatively low.
If your definition of trivially easy is hiring a lawyer and waiting months or longer for a trial all while having a hard/impossible time to hold a job. You'd still have no guarantee of winning either.
Sadly, suing for the harms caused by someone else's presumption of guilt flips the responsibility around - now you have to do the expensive work of proving they acted harmfully and illegally.
Probably what they did was legal, but even if not it would be the work of months or years and many thousands of dollars to get any kind of compensation.
I think thousands of people who have plead guilty to something they didn't do, so that they could move on with what they still had of their lives, would be laughing bitterly when reading this and thinking "Oh, you precious thing."
I've had an estranged family member and a job offer come to me through Facebook messages. They both ended up in the "other senders" section on the website - which I didn't even know existed for years. I read some news story on messages lost into that folder, checked it, and realized that major events in my life had disappeared into someone's shitty UX choice.
I don't even know what to do about this - deleting my FB account might stop people from doing this, but it's far from guaranteed and any test I run now will be invalid as soon as the UX changes again.
I believe that if you don't have the app, Facebook sends you an email saying you have new Messenger message. I've never used Messenger, and this has happened to me.
The problem isn't whether or not you have Messenger; the problem is that (as a spam prevention measure?), FB will blackhole messages sent to you by non-friends.
I work in health care. I can't begin to tell you how many hours are spent at the beginning of any project that involves another system discussing patient matching. A simple unique identifier would change so much about healthcare.
I work in a system that has that. It isn't the holy land you dream of. Yes, it helps but people forget it, have 2, have none and others transpose numbers, type a wrong value and generally ruin it. If there was a non creepy way of having an RFID embedded at birth...
You'd also be surprised how often the patient is trying to mislead. Immigration status, serious mental health issues and being wanted by the police are the three that have hit me (that I known of). It's particularly hard when there is intent to deceive.
A few years back I was cleaning up my Facebook account and I stumbled across all of my received messages (mail? Not the same thing as Messenger). I was surprised because there were hundreds of them and I had never seen any of them before. People had responded to my marketplace listings, wanted to get lunch, asked about my pages, accepted an interview application, all kind of useful things hidden away from my view for half a decade.
Something similar happened to me with regular Facebook messages. Facebook, to combat spam, decided to introduce the concept of folders for messages. Besides the regular folder for messages from friends, there was ”Others“ into which all other messages were put.
The UI didn’t make it very prominent and I learned about the Others folder only when I read an article about how someone missed appointments for job applications, invitations and messages from acquaintances because Facebook sorted these messages into the Others folder. Back then this happened quietly, without notification of the user. I checked my Others folder and found years old messages. Insane. All the missed opportunities and trouble that was caused for millions of people because Facebook intervened in their communication.
I think Facebook now at least informs the user if they received a message from a non-friended person. Took them a long time.
That's what struck me too. As a white person, it has never once occurred to me that I might get fined for walking around after 10pm. Because I never would be.
The fine was for walking through a park that closes after 10pm. They use this to prevent people from sleeping in the park at night or doing other things like prostitution and drug use in the cover of darkness. There was a city park across from my dorm in college. The park had clearly visible no trespassing after 10pm signs. We would still walk through since it was the quickest route but cops were quick to pull up and give anyone a warning. I only ever heard of people getting tickets when they were doing stuff like underaged drinking and smoking weed in the park at night.
When I was a long haired white poor kid in a relatively rich suburb they used to always hassle us for laws like this. I think my personal favorite was when they brought ten police cars to crack down on five us standing in the park on a Saturday afternoon and make us disperse.
I remember asking them
"If we cannot stand in the park where are we allowed to go?"
Park Curfew tickets like this ended up costing many of my friends their crappy apartments because they couldn't pay the fine and the fees for the community service.
This is a serious question. I was not trying to be snarky, just trying to determine just how different things are if you are, say, a young black guy breaking a minor rule like that. I know the consequences are definitely different in Chicago if you are black, but I was wondering if things are better in other places in the US.
(Given the contents of the article, I realize NYC is similar to Chicago, I guess I was assuming you live in another area of the country?)
> The fine was for walking through a park that closes after 10pm.
That seems excessively broad. Aren't prostitution and drug use already illegal?
I have a photo of a sign in New Orleans forbidding this, and forbidding sleeping.
I was amazed at the number of signs showing what was forbidden in public spaces in the USA when I visited. It didn't square with my expectations of "the Land of the Free".
On the one hand, if the laws do indeed vary, then the signs make some sense. But there were signs forbidding things like "lewd conduct and public masturbation", or "public defecation", which I assume are generally forbidden.
It felt like someone thought I needed instructions on how to use a park.
Prostitution can be difficult to prosecute. "No, no, officer, the money was to play checkers. I only touched his wiener by accident." Catching someone soliciting generally requires a sting operation, which comes close to the line of entrapment. In that sense, loitering laws are more clear cut. You're in the park or you're not, and they don't usually station undercover cops nearby trying to entice pedestrians into the park to bust them.
Very likely everyone was and also looked middle or upper class.
If they weren't such, they probably wouldn't have gotten off with warnings and both them and their parents would have had quite a tiff that would have actually gotten something productive done as a result.
in their communities? This is the standard we hold ourselves to in the United States of America. Also see Singapore where you can be caned for spitting gum on the sidewalk.
I've never been tempted to do any of these things, and crazy thing, I've never gotten a ticket for any of them.
Walk around at 10pm. Just don't walk in the closed park.
Is it inconvenient to walk around the park? Sure it is. Should people plan for that, knowing about it? Probably. Do people do so? Usually not. Same thing with jaywalking. It isn't the same as "how dare people walk across a street".
They're free to walk across the street - just do so at the cross walk. Likewise, they're free to walk around after 10pm - just not in the park.
Wasn't in the budget to build the park and likely wouldn't get approval for funding if it were. The alternative of an unfunded park is no park.
The tickets from people ignoring signs is also additional revenue to the town/state so there is some financial motivation to not spend money on a gate (and staff responsible for locking/opening the gate).
No joke, this is happening to me right now with the SF MTA. I've already proved to them I don't own the car, but it seems like they didn't update their system last time, so I got another ticket for something I didn't do, at a place I've never been to in my life.
This happened to a photography editor who sits in the cube across from me. He found out he had a ticket in Pittsburgh, a city he had never been to, when he tried to transfer his license to a new state.
No lawyer would take the case either. He eventually went to an identity theft company, who took $400 and fixed the issue in three months.
I use to work in Identity Management at a major university. A number of people came through our systems without SSNs. We had a complicated set of rules to make sure we didn't provision two accounts. We'd check if the names were reversed and we'd check both the month/date = date/month on the date of birth (people from other countries might enter it backwards without thinking about it). We even had rules for SSNs that were off by <2 digits with similar names. Every morning we'd have a set of "manual provisions" we'd have to stop and check.
Occasionally duplicate accounts get created and we'd have to go through a big manual process of combining them and telling them "You need to use this account; forget about the other one. It no longer exists," and get their stuff synced across all AD domains (Universities typically have several).
What surprises me about this article is the NYC system doesn't use the SSN (which is good in a sense, it should never be used as a identification number, see the latest GCP Greg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus).
The idea of an identity and criminal record us that follows us digitally is a very new concept, one that didn't exist 150+ years ago; or at least no where near the complexity it does today. Immigration was also treated very differently. Most of are criminal background procedures in the US are plagued with problems like this; which is why most counties require fingerprint/criminal checks for immigration screenings.
Today, the idea of a national identification number is highly opposed in the United States. In some ways I favour this as I feel digital identities lead to a situation where people cannot escape their pasts. But it also means people use absolutely terrible ways to associate people such as name and birthday; totally non-unique fields that should never be used to identify people. SSNs offer no real security; no photos and your number +1/-1 is most likely a valid SSN of someone who was born the same day as you.
English: let's have separate sizes for fasteners vs the rest of the worldlet's use a separate standard for every physical measurementlet's write dates backwardlet's drive on the wrong side of the road
Frankly I'm surprised that we didn't use big endian for x86.
The pioneering arguments is correct in some fields. For example TV sets and computer/phone screens are still measured in inches all around the world. I'm in Italy and I think gas pipes in houses are still measured in inches [1] and some bicycle components come with metric and imperial sizes. The imperial ones are getting rare. On the other side engines are measured in cubic centimeters even in the USA.
But the pioneering argument doesn't apply to everything. Every country or area inside countries had their own units of measurement for basic stuff like mass of things, weight of food, volume of cups, length of poles, exactly like every city had its own time before time zones. There is no pioneering in the size and weight of containers for wheat. It's stuff people have been doing since before writing.
Basically every country standardized most units but the USA didn't. I think that having the larger economy in the world played a role in that. There are no incentives to adapt when the rest of the world will build a slightly different size of everything only for the US market.
[1] Check this conversion table for gas pipes http://www.azzistudio.it/tavola.html and notice the weird values for the metric sizes (millimeters). Nobody would build pipes with those diameters if they started metric centuries ago.
TL;DR x86 is little-endian for compatibility with the Datapoint 2200.
From Stan Mazor's 1995 survey article "The History of the microcomputer - Invention and Evolution" from Proceedings of the IEEE, pp. 1601-1607, Dec. 1995,
A. Little Endian
Some have wondered why the addresses in the 8008 were
stored "backward" with the little end first, e.g., the low
order byte of a two byte address is stored in the lower
addressed memory location. I (regrettably) specified this
ordering as part of the JUMP instruction format in the spirit
of compatibility with the Datapoint 2200. Recall that their
original processor was bit serial; the addresses would be
stored low to high bit in the machine code (bit backward).
Other computer makers organize the addresses with the "big
end" first. The lack of standardization has been a problem
in the industry.
I think you mean American, especially for the measurements, where American measurements are different even from the old British/Commonwealth system.
A pint of beer or cider in Britain is 568mL, in the USA 473mL, but everything else in a British bar is sold in metric units. And today is "the third of April", 3/4/2016.
There are a few choices of order in use in various parts of the world. Only one is unambiguous as a string of numbers: Year, month, day (where year is four digits, not two.) Because year/day/month does not seem to be in use anywhere.
Today is the 93rd of Checkuary, 2016. That is equivalent to the 3rd of April, 2017.
Checkuary is the unofficial 13th month of every year. It lasts until you remember to write the correct year number on all of your checks.
As an American, I write it as 3Apr2017 to avoid ambiguity. I can't stand how the traditional all-numeric date format is neither big-endian nor little-endian.
As a British person living in Denmark, I haven't written a cheque for about... well... a long time.
My current British bank account didn't come with a cheque book, but the one I had when I was a student did. So probably 2009 or so; maybe one or two per year before that.
The American banking system is still in the 1990s. We have no direct person-to-person transfers here.
When you use your bank to pay a bill on-line, unless it's a major utility that worked with your bank to setup an ACH payment means, the bank will typically still print a paper check and send it to its destination.
We have electronic transfer (ACH) using the bank (ABA or routing number) and account number, but it's not available to regular people. People often keep these two numbers secrete to prevent identity theft.
Most other countries, you put your friends bank num, account num and name and it will show up in their account the very next day (even on holidays!) for free. In the US, you have to use 3rd party payment systems like PayPal, which charge fees and don't really do bank-to-bank transfers.
The time for an electronic transfer to go through is now seconds in the UK, Denmark and several other European countries.
(The UK system guarantees two hours, but it's usually seconds.)
You can also use a mobile phone number instead of knowing the bank account numbers. This is extremely common in Denmark, including for purchases; the same system exists in the UK but it is less often used.
I've written one ever here in NZ and it bounced - the bank cancelled the account due to me not using it ever and didn't tell me. It was for a house too, so that was fun.
As in a home loan deposit are an outright house purchase?
In Australia when I did this it was done via a different kind of cheque, I forget what it was called because I haven't used one before or since, but I had to the bank in person to get it.
It was the deposit (pains on going unconditional) and was a cheque from a cheque book. The whole thing was a farce. The bank rang and gave me a hard time for not having a cheque book, whilst having the cheque in their hand.
It's less broken than the mixed insanity that is popular in America, and as I described, there is a functional situation in which the ordering might even be preferential.
Never the less, the one true date format is ISO 8601, and it should be used everywhere there isn't a clear and over-riding reason to use another format.
I don't really understand the opposition to using a national identification number. It's a (non-secret) code to uniquely identify people, exactly what would've been needed in the Lisa Davis case, and exactly what quite a few countries are using without problems.
Just don't use it for any kind of authentication, ever, because it's not a secret. Also, add a checksum to avoid typos.
A simple explanation of the opposition is that a national identification number will be assigned, and then we go cashless, then only people with those numbers will be able to do commerce of any type. Add in a bit of requirements that would require a violation of someone's religion and you got the story. Preventing a national id number stops part of the problem. Expect a lot of push back on any attempt to get rid of cash.
When I was young there was privacy. Believe it or not, you could start a new life somewhere else if you wished, and leave the old one behind, without any great effort. Move and get an unlisted number and you might as well have vanished from the face of the earth. Freedom as I knew it then required privacy, these were not concepts that could be separated.
I'm not sure what the West means by freedom now; since I'm no longer in a practical sense free to do so much that I was once free to do, without scrutiny. No doubt crime rates are down as a result; but reducing crime wasn't the purpose of freedom. Of course, it would take real effort to maintain privacy in a digital world. I think the time will come when we make that effort.
In my case, it's someone with a different name, but they think the car belongs to me. It's my old car that I sold to a dealer, who then sold it to this person. I'm pretty sure the DMV knows because I updated the registration, but the SF MTA doesn't appear to know, so I get tickets threatening me with really bad things if I don't pay or contest them each time.
By "updated the registration," did you fill out a release of liability form after you sold it? It's probably too late now, but most states have a form you fill out after the sale of a car to indicate it's no longer in your possession (so they don't charge you for things like parking tickets; toll roads, red light cameras).
I wonder if I could defend myself from this using the Moves app (which is basically an opt-in way to have your location tracked and logged by another party)
I spent 7 years basically unable to get credit because I owed $180k on a tractor in Kansas. I had never been to Kansas. Someone had transposed the last 2 digits of a SSN.
Interesting thought. Still, possession is more than nine-tenths of being able to put something up for auction. If you could find a buyer sight-unseen, you'd be liable for fraud, alas. And you'd have given someone incentive to sort the mess out in order to charge you.
The tractor (technically some sort of 'harvester') had cost around $700k. The farmer had stopped paying (probably went bankrupt) and still owed $180k.
I was a 19yo, freshly back to the US from Germany (I had been there since I was 11) and suddenly found I was unable to obtain any sort of credit (like getting a phone, electricity, an apartment etc.)
Everyone involved could easily see what happened. And no one could fix it.
Pretty much the same thing happened to me just a few weeks ago. I found out someone used my insurance info to pay for their emergency room visit.
After much amateur sleuth-work, I came to find that the person had the exact same name and birth date, and the hospital had messed up the insurance lookup.
Of course, when I called the hospital to resolve the situation, and provided a copy of my license to prove my identity, they admitted they made a mistake.
And two weeks later, they used to the address from my license to send me the hospital bill.
Perhaps you need to look at this differently and address it with someone other than the billing department.
"Two weeks later they used the address from my license to illegally send me someone else's PHI."
If calling the hospital and asking to talk to someone "Because you sent me someone else's medical information" doesn't get their attention, ask them about their breach notification procedures.
I honestly don't think anyone that I'd be able to talk to on the phone there cares. Between the 4 or 5 people they passed me around to, I was given info about this other person that they had no right to give out.
And that's the lesson here. Customer support representatives are so far removed from positions where they can actually be helpful, that all they are able to provide anymore is apathy and canned responses.
That's why I phrased it as I did. I'm pretty sure that by sending his bills (presumably containing information on procedures performed, ICD10 detailed diagnosis codes, etc.) this could be considered a breach. Obviously it covers fewer than 500 individuals and the matching names is a complicating factor, but I believe that they're still required to report it to HHS within the first 2 months of 2018, and to notify the other person.
Assuming that their training is worth anything at all, getting a supervisor and saying "I believe there's been a HIPAA violation and I need to know who to talk to" should get IMMEDIATE attention - it goes beyond application of a clue-by-four and should immediately get you connected to their Compliance Officer. That person should have all sorts of motivation to get things straightened out so it's not an ongoing breach with further disclosures post-notification.
The other kicker is that I believe the rules changed recently such that if an individual reports a breach and it results in fines, that individual may now receive part of the penalty amount (caveat: I didn't find a citation for this, just have heard it discussed somewhere). My guess is that in your case with a matching name it's unlikely that there'd be anything like that, but just the prospect of the headaches involved should motivate people to resolve the situation.
Maybe I'm just naïve but shouldn't the burden of proof be on the city to prove she's the person that was ticketed? A name and birthdate are not proof of anything.
The judge is the one who determines what's "proof". In the story, he decided that name & birthdate was enough to not dismiss the case. She could have hired a lawyer and spent time fighting the case and maybe won, but she wanted to get it resolved immediately and a guilty plea is the only way to do that.
City wants money. If it isn't this person, then the chance of them getting money goes way down. So they have a perverse incentive to force this person to pay, regardless if it is them or not, as long as the person isn't willing to fight a legal battle that ends up costing more money (if few enough people fight the legal battle, it may be more profitable to let them win their fights and keep charging all the people who don't fight). This is the problem letting the same the same entity that decides a punishment benefit from that punishment.
The author breezed over a potentially important part:
> I had never been to any other kind of court except traffic court (at which, both times, the police officers had flat-out lied).
Reading into that it sounds like they had name, birthday, and the issuing officer saying, "yes, that was her".
If the officers can't reliably witness they shouldn't be a part of the process. There should be enough records taken at the time of the ticket that the officers unreliable testimony shouldn't be needed or used.
I think you have to be pretty crazy to honestly believe that cops can id a witness in anything other than extraordinary cases. How many tickets does an officer issue in the average day? 20? 30? 50+? I'd be absolutely shocked if the average cop could accurately id most of their traffic stops at the end of their shift, mustless days, weeks, or months later.
i still don't understand why she in first place admitted guilt for something she didn't do? is this really common procedure to admit something you didn't do in US?
For minor cases, it costs less to plea guilty outright.
But this often holds true for even major crimes.
Plea guilty: Get 90 day suspended sentence, pay fines of $1000.
Fight case: Chance of 10 years in prison, pay $10,000 to lawyer guaranteed, chance of fines of $10,000.
Add in a prosecutor who is fighting dirty, which would you pick?
The problem is that trumped up charges, being offered significantly reduced plea deals, the cost of fighting the charges, and how awful public defenders are (regardless of fault) all combine into a nightmare where very few are willing to demand their right to trial.
To me the simplest solution is to end plea deals because they are effectively a punishment for insisting on a right. Cutting the sentence by 90% if someones takes a plea is the same as increasing a sentence by 1000% if someone demands on their right to a trial. This should not be allowed.
I totally agree, plea deals are effectively a punishment for invoking your right to a trial. People should absolutely be allowed to plead guilty, but they shouldn't be rewarded for it.
The only argument I've seen for plea deals is that they save time and money. Which I'm sure is true, but is that really sufficient reason to mess with people's right to a trial?
Plea deals do save time and money, but at what expense? They allow for courts to try more cases that they would otherwise ignore as insignificant. They allow those who commit major crimes to get off with much lighter sentences (I've read about child sexual abuse cases pleading down to child endangerment, which raises far less flags on a background check). They also allow people to be bludgeoned into accepting charges they are innocent of. I just don't see how people can justify it at all.
But in any country without plea guilt deal like mine, you have only once choice : the trial with full cost and the possible high sentence. I don't get what you loose with the deal, it's just an additional option.
For any individual case, you don't lose by having the option available. But more options doesn't always lead to better outcomes, see the Prisoners' Dilemma for the classic example.
In this situation, having lots of plea deals predisposes the system to increase sentences for cases which go to trial, in order to get more plea deals. If every single person gets the harsher "trial" punishment, then there will be pressure to make the punishment fit the crime. When only 6% of people get that one, and 94% get a lighter sentence due to a plea deal, the "trial" punishment can be way worse.
For a really obvious and somewhat contrived example of how more options isn't necessarily a good thing, imagine if you could get a discount on your taxes if you agreed never to criticize the government. You don't have to take that choice, and you lose nothing by having it available, but I think most of us would see that program as a really bad thing.
> In this situation, having lots of plea deals predisposes the system to increase sentences for cases which go to trial, in order to get more plea deals.
...
> if you could get a discount on your taxes if you agreed never to criticize the government.
Ah ok. The problem is not the deal itself, but that the system's goal then lead to utilize the deal in negative ways.
I think that's right. A plea deal in any given case may be OK, but when they're a pervasive part of the system they start to look like a punishment for insisting on a trial.
In England, there's no such thing as a plea deal, but a guilty plea is taken into account at sentencing. It's tacitly understood that you'll get a modest reduction in your sentence if you plead guilty, but there's no explicit guarantee. It's enough to induce pleas from the obviously guilty, but it won't sway anyone who stands a chance of winning a trial.
The American system is clearly not serving justice, as we saw in the Swartz case. The gulf between plea deals and sentences at trial can only be explained by an intention to coerce innocent men into pleading guilty.
The whole of society loses in so many ways. Forcing a trial to occur ensures that prosecutions cost money, hopefully substantially more than they are able to collect in fines.
A functional court system transfers money from society as a whole to fund the necessary punishment of individuals. Each action is a financial loss so its not incentivized to pursue them unless society as a whole benefits enough to justify the cost of the system.
A dysfunctional system derives monetary gain from persecuting individuals and thus is incentivized to do so even if society doesn't benefit and in fact even if they aren't guilty. This is exactly what you see in this story.
Further people faced with life destroying circumstances aren't rational actors they can be easy to manipulate into a plea with sufficient threats. Having a trial especially in serious matters ensures justice has at least a chance to be done.
The motives for such are pretty easy to see in her story. "In 2015, I failed a background check for a new job because, according to the NYPD, I hadn’t paid the ticket 'I' had gotten for walking in a park in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn after hours, at 10pm. Now there was a misdemeanor on my record, and I had 60 days to clear it up if I wanted to keep the job, which meant trekking to lower Manhattan to criminal court. ...I tried to explain the long history of mix-ups, but the judge wouldn’t listen. He told me I’d have to go to trial, which could take months. By that time the job would be long gone. ...The cop told me to go back in and plead guilty, and then I’d pay a fine and the judge would dismiss the charge and let me off with a warning."
She believed the costs to pleading guilty would be lower than fighting the charge.
95% of all inmates in the United States never had a trial. Due process is dead. It makes sense to me why someone would plead guilty and take a short plea deal than risk rotting in prison for years on trumped up charges.
The cost and bother of fighting such minor tickets, especially when the defense is kind of odd like this case, are both way beyond the small fines minor nuisance tickets like this have. Also she tried the first couple times this happened and didn't get anywhere with the judge in court (which isn't too surprising the courts that deal with those tickets have a huge number of cases to deal with every day) and she was able to get the tickets expunged through the system after pleading guilty.
It's incredibly common for low-level criminal charges, as much of the time they will allow you to plea to a non-criminal offence rather than charging you with a misdemeanor.
Even if you figure on a 1-in-1000 chance of being wrongly convicted it is probably not worth the risk of having a criminal charge on your record.
I have a number of friends who have done so; the funny thing is even the for ones who had done something wrong, they had not done the thing they plead to.
(most strangely is someone who was ticketed for reckless driving, fought it and took a deal for a noise violation; it was the same fine, but no points on the license; their car was definitely not too loud).
Seems like one solution would've been to legally change her name to "Lisa Xhkuwbiyt" (pronounced "Lisa Davis") since the legal records system in NY is so dumb.
My ex husband is a junior. He joined the army not long before his father -- the senior -- retired from the army. My husband (and his father) had all kinds of pay problems the first few months of service as they mixed up the pay of father and son who were living in different places, had vastly different ranks, but were banking with the same bank.
Yes, the federal government was doing this. It was all kinds of fun.
(For once in my life, I am grateful for my weird ass name.)
While I find it wonderful and charming that the two Lisa's finally met, and became good friends, one has to wonder at what point does such a problem become so great that simply changing one's name is the better solution?
At some point, you have to ask yourself whether continuing down the same road is going to become a net loss in your life, and make the change to prevent that. That's part of being an adult. While it isn't her fault that this is happening, and it would be unfair to her that she should have to change her name to fix it, it would be the best and quickest way to prevent this issue in the future.
Especially why there are warrants and other things going on which could lead to permanent life-altering events (for instance, what if in the future one of these Lisa's is wanted for murder, or something else, that sends a boatload of SWAT agents to her door in the middle of the night?). Heck, what if her new friend dies, or has something else major happen to her, and the records get mixed?
With such possibilities, I know I wouldn't think twice about getting my name changed.
A Modest Proposal: Let's just all agree to have totally unique names. A simple way to do this would be to append a UUID to our surnames. That way we don't have to create new fields, any system that supports at least 2 names will continue to work. Socially we can "drop the UUID" - at least in informal situations.
I'm in, but do note that companies can't even get a email field that works correctly ("thanks for the regex, SO!"). No way more than 50% of websites as written can handle a string containing numbers and $DEITY only knows what.
The author really does seem to think of black people as children who can't possibly be held accountable for anything they've done.
What must it be like to be on the receiving end of such paternalism? It sounds awful. And horrifically damaging. If people tell you every day that you can't win, and you have no responsibility for bad decisions you make, how can you possibly succeed after such a psych-war campaign to make you into a control-externalizing mental infant? I'd hate my parents forever if they did this to me.
She meets her black name-sharer who reveals that she is, surprise, a single mother with three kids (who she bore very young), while the author stayed married and had kids late. News flash: Blacks who simply wait to have kids and have them when married and stay married are overwhelmingly not in poverty. Meanwhile, whites who fail to do these things are very often in poverty. No racist white person is forcing anyone to have kids in their teenage years, from multiple men, and fail to marry. These are personal decisions, and bad decisions have bad consequences for people of any race.
And then they sit around talking about "the utter ridiculousness of upper-middle-class white people". Yes, so ridiculous, not having kids out of wedlock, and forming stable social arrangements.
And "the intense differences between Brownsville and Park Slope, very different Brooklyn neighborhoods but both suffering from a severe lack of diversity.". Yes, I'm sure those white neighborhoods are really "suffering" because there are too many whites. Must be a nightmare.
She literally calls it a "version of justice" when black people give false information to police to avoid tickets for public violence: "Now I understood why the tickets were never paid: most of these Lisa Davises had, in some way, disappeared. They had given fake addresses or moved, and they were skirting the law – their own version of justice – however they could."
Yes, there is racism against blacks. No, that doesn't mean black are morally-perfect shining hearts of goodness whose every action is perfect. People are people; the way this author wipes away the individual to make everyone simply a piece of their group, the way she excuses any action from someone in a victim class, is kind of horrifying. And it is racism.
Note: To "suffer from" means to be affected by, in some detrimental sense. It isn't the same as "to suffer", and the author didn't use the phrase the elicit sympathy the way you seem to interpret her.
Reading between the lines, "suffering from a lack of diversity" really means that it's a monoculture, and that this is not good for the city.
"What must it be like to be on the receiving end of such paternalism? It sounds awful. And horrifically damaging."
Is "paternalism" in this case a euphemism for centuries of slavery, legal segregation, and general racism? Because, yes, that can be horrifically damaging to people.
So, basically if you think single motherhood as a phenomenon is a social problem, in her mind, you are blaming single mothers. I never understand this kind of mind-twisting.
Why wouldn't you blame a parent for having a child (assuming consensual sex between people who understand where babies come from) when said adult is not capable of caring for it?
The thing is, you should. It's regrettable that today in this "enlightened" age with such astonishing technology we refuse the agency of certain groups of people for the convenience of political narratives.
This article blows my mind. At no point did she consider that these people could actually be responsible for their actions and that what was happening to her was the result of someone repeatedly violating the law and refusing to deal with the consequences. The real problem here is obviously the incredibly flawed use of name + DOB as a unique identifier, but the author doesn't focus on that and instead delivers what really feels like a racist lecture about how this entire situation is the result of some kind of systemic injustice against a whole group of people just for the color of their skin.
While I doubt it's quite as "black and white" as the article insists, there's no doubt about differential enforcement:
"The racial disparity persists even after controlling for precinct variability and race-specific estimates of crime participation.[6][7] Research suggests that stop-and-frisk had few effects, if any, on crime in New York City.[8][9]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit...
Oh dear god, they might. I think either they'd start a new file, which would let you clear out even valid tickets assigned to you, or they'd rename their folder and then start a new one next time not-changed-Lisa-Davis got ticketed.
She could try, but then there would be issues with that, I'm betting. Some way for it all to still affect her because it used to be her name, as well as dealing with issues from the name change.
In addition to the other reasons listed, it also probably wouldn't be unique enough.
It seems that their records are keyed off of ONLY:
* Birthdate
* Last Name
* First name
If I were going to take the bother of changing my name I'd make the middle name, a part I can drop from most non-legal/contractual areas, the actual unique identifier. By which I mean I'd have the "middle name" be a short normal name post-fixed by a base26 encoded hash; I should probably also add 'son' at the end of that... say it's European...
04 bits = Middle initial (It's actually 5, but I imagine the common ones cluster)
10 bits = First Name
10 bits = Last Name
120 bits = 42 adult years (12*10): 3-years ~=1024 slots ~= 10 bits
A naive approach might be to add all of these together, except that's unaware of the Birthday Paradox (aka Birthday Problem).
The sets are larger, but even with the addition of those extra 4 bits there's still going to be overlap in a non-trivial population.
When is there a "good" chance of a match in all of the fields that matter? What is a "good" chance? What is an acceptable collision?
I think most sane people would agree that the final question is the important one. In matters that can derail someone's life and send them to jail an acceptable false positive rate is ZERO. Therefore answering the preceding questions is largely meaningless, we already have example proof of at least one failure, which is enough to declare the system inherently broken.
She could, but it's a workaround to a problem that isn't hers, and the possibility of the same problem happening to someone else still exists (and there is likely many more instances). Lisa Davis is a perfectly fine name; she shouldn't have to change it for any reason.
That would require a lawsuit the author most likely couldn't afford and most lawyers wouldn't touch unless there was a significant payday (or at least a recovery of expenses) involved.
Even if she prevailed, there's no guarantee that the problem would be fixed in a reasonable time frame, or at all.
I could change my name for ~$100, new passport and license costs, and an aggravating amount of paperwork.
I could convince the New York DMV to fix their record-keeping by... well, maybe if I convinced an influential politician to shame them for it. Maybe. I suppose I could devote years of my life to a public campaign about the issue. There's a chance that would work, though probably they'd just fix my file to shut me up and not fix the system.
If your point is that this is insane, then yes, yes it is. But changing your name is almost certainly easier than convincing a large, high-bureaucracy state DMV to solve the problems they cause.
If she changes her name it's easier, cheaper, faster, and more likely to actually happen. I agree that she shouldn't have to, but it is most likely the best solution.
This is obviously a fairly extreme case where enough identifiers match (as well as rough location) that supposedly unique official records aren't in fact unique.
But, even outside of official records, I often
wonder how many issues there are these days where someone with a relatively unusual name happens to share that name with someone with a prominent web profile. And that person could plausibly be them (for reasons of age, location, occupation) and have some background that would give potential employers, dates, etc. serious pause.
In pre-web days, I knew someone in NYC who shared a name with someone who was notorious (and widely hated) in New York sports circles. My acquaintance literally got death threats on his home answering machine.
You could argue the US already comes close to it given SSN and driver's license numbers. But coming right out and having an official permanent identity number just gives a lot of people the willies. Heck, a handful of states won't even adopt REAL ID to better standardize driver's licenses.
I'm not sure I even disagree. Even if the practical effect (for good or ill) is negligible in most cases, it starts to tread a bit too close to "your papers please" and standardized tracking across all systems. Some inefficiency and ambiguity isn't always a bad thing.
My name is quite unique, and people are not sure what is middle name, and what is last name. So often they cannot find my file and sometimes they create a new file, so they believe I am multiple persons. Well, at least I think that is what my health care insurance is doing. My employer pays 600€/month to them, the insurance sends me newsletter snailmail every month, and when I go to the doctor, the insurance says I am not insured with them, they have no records about me; or that the insurance had not been paid for months; or they send me a e-mail that cannot send me letters, because they do not have my physical address ...
I have very uncommon first and last names. We apparently both go to the same national bank. And my parents met his parents when the traveled on vacation.
It's a small world. And even worse if you have common names.
> I had to plead guilty and pay the fine to restore my license
No she didn't, forcing the court to investigate its own ineptitude rather than accept guilt is exactly what our system is for. Even a public defender would have stood a good chance at spotting this.
Or when she was shown the other address, she should have recorded it and sent a letter or visited the other person. They could have cleared this up much earlier then the time 4 elections take.
You are quite correct, she could have declined and let her license remain suspended for months while it was all ironed out. Better hope she didn't get stopped and charged with driving on a suspended license, because that just starts to get too meta - "We can't go to trial on this yet your honor, because I'm waiting on the previous trial to prove that it wasn't my license that should have been suspended in the first place!"
This is like standing in the crosswalk screaming at the cars that you have right-of-way. Truth, Justice, The American Way, Honor, Beauty and everything else may be on your side, but that bumper at 30MPH is still going to hurt like hell.
> This is like standing in the crosswalk screaming at the cars that you have right-of-way.
This is literally what people do where I live. I once saw a guy stop walking in the middle of the street and flip the bird to a driver who didn't seem to be slowing down. I almost had a heart attack when I thought I was about to see the pedestrian get plastered, but the driver swerved to the other lane and drove past him. Then the pedestrian yelled "fuck you!" after him.
I haven't seen anyone get hit yet, but I feel it's bound to happen one of these days. The pedestrians around here are insane. It's amazing what they'll do just because they have the legal right of way.
Sure, and sometimes insanity looks like insanity to an observer. In this case, I find it very hard to believe that the issue is rights. The drivers don't intend to hit the pedestrians—they're being reckless, not oppressing the pedestrian minority. And if the pedestrians honestly believed they'd get hit, I doubt they'd stand in the middle of the road flipping people off. Both parties are acting recklessly.
I once crossed a crosswalk at a 4-way stop. A car started accelerating from their stop sign. I could have kept walking to "stand up for my rights," but I chose to stop walking just in case the car wasn't going to stop.
Turns out the driver was a slightly older guy who didn't see me at all. He blew right passed me (within a foot of where I stopped), saw me out his driver's window, and slammed on the breaks. If I hadn't stopped, I'd have been hit hard. It's true he would have been the one at fault, but that's hardly some victory. He was a bad driver, not someone purposefully ignoring my right of way.
Forget pedestrians; this is why driving schools teach so-called defensive driving style. Even if you're legally faultless, it's much better to avoid an accident than to put yourself in danger just because you have the "right" to do it. Do you know how many accidents you could cause every day by ignoring safety when you have right-of-way? Standing up for your rights is hardly an excuse to plow into every car that pulls out in front of you.
I think your traffic analogy is poor. The results of failure are quite different. In one the pedestrian might die, because physic... in the other a different solution to the transportation problem needs to be found for a temporary period.
Driving on a suspended license was not the only choice, rides, public transport, or even simply requesting a close court date. She might even have been able to get some kind of special waiver, until it was sorted out, by taking the time to try to sort it out.
Her choice to capitulate in the beginning caused her 20 years of misery and potential affecting her ability to vote. It also made it harder to fix because now there is a "proof" she drives unsafely, who knows what this did to her insurance rates.
This could all be prevented. These organizations are just flat-out negligent and don't care.