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Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

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Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#111

Post by kavalg »

londons_explore wrote: post #41
whizzter wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open to research yes. Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks. AI firms have shown themselves to be playing fast and loose with copyrighted works, a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that would otherwise have been expunged after a few years.

"court records are public forever" and "records of crimes expunged after X years" are incompatible. Instead, we should make it illegal to discriminate based on criminal conviction history. Just like it is currently illegal to discriminate based on race or religion. That data should not be illegal to know, but illegal to use to make most decisions relating to that person.

Discrimination could be very hard to prove in practice.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#112

Post by LeifCarrotson »

newsclues wrote: post #86
londons_explore wrote: post #6

Something is either public record - in which case it should be on a government website for free, and the AI companies should be free to scrape to their hearts desire... Or it should be sealed for X years and then public record. Where X might be 1 in cases where you don't want to hurt an ongoing investigation, or 100 if it's someone's private affairs. Nothing that goes through the courts should be sealed forever. We s…

I want information to be free. I don't think all information should be easily accessible. Some information should be in libraries, held for the public to access, but have that access recorded. If a group of people (citizens of a country) have data stored, they ought to be able to access it, but others maybe should pay a fee. There is data in "public records" that should be very hard to access, such as evidence of a c…

Totally agreed! This is yet another example of reduced friction due to improved technology breaking a previously functional system without really changing the qualities it had before. I don't understand why this isn't obvious to more people. It's been said that "quantity has a quality all its own", and this is even more true when that quantity approaches infinity.

Yes, license plates are public, and yes, a police officer could have watched to see whether or not a suspect vehicle went past. No, that does not mean that it's the same thing to put up ALPRs and monitor the travel activity of every car in the country. Yes, court records should be public, no, that doesn't mean an automatic process is the same as a human process.

I don't want to just default to the idea that the way society was organized when I was a young person is the way it should be organized forever, but the capacity for access and analysis when various laws were passed and rights were agreed upon are completely different from the capacity for access and analysis with a computer.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#113

Post by Defletter »

g-mork wrote: post #89

Confused what to make of the comments here. Access to court lists has always been free and open, it's just a pain in the ass to work with. The lists contain nothing much of value beyond the names involved in a case and the type of hearing It's not easy to see who to believe. The MP introducing it claiming there is a "cover up" is just what MPs do. Of course it makes him look bad, a service he oversaw the introduction…

Would you mind elaborating on this new replacement system?

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#114

Post by notahacker »

reliabilityguy wrote: post #61
pjc50 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone banging on about coverups of crime due to immigrants should get immediately put in the bad faith argument bin, even if they were a Minister.

Why? Immigrants cannot commit crimes? This kind of logic does more disservice than people realize. You can combat bigotry towards immigrants (issue #1), without covering up for criminal immigrants (issue #2) in fear of increase of issue #1 among the natives. It only brings up more resentment and bigotry.

You can also insinuate that decisions completely unrelated to immigrants (issue #3) are a coverup to "protect immigrants" in order to use the popularity of bigotry towards immigrants (issue #1) to make the issue salient to bigots that have literally no interest in the rights or wrongs of third party court databases, which anyone with the slightest level of political understanding can see is going on here.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#115

Post by blell »

pjc50 wrote: post #83
reliabilityguy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Immigrants cannot commit crimes? This kind of logic does more disservice than people realize. You can combat bigotry towards immigrants (issue #1), without covering up for criminal immigrants (issue #2) in fear of increase of issue #1 among the natives. It only brings up more resentment and bigotry.

Crimes are committed by individuals. "Immigrants" is a group. Prosecution of sexual assault is often handled extremely badly. It needs to be done better, without fear or favor, including people who are friends with the police or in positions of power. As we're seeing the fallout of the Epstein files.

Immigration policy is one of the most important things people vote for in an election. We need transparent crime data so we can make an informed vote.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#116

Post by carlosjobim »

pjc50 wrote: post #78
carlosjobim wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain your reasoning? Horrible crimes committed by foreign men against native children were covered up for political reasons in the UK. This is common knowledge.

In the case of Rotherham, I believe that most of those committing the crimes were not foreign; most were British born British nationals. Ethnicity is not the same as immigration status.

The question is: Would the crimes have been covered up by authorities if the predators were ethnically English and the victims were children of foreigners?

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#117

Post by g-mork »

Defletter wrote: post #113
g-mork wrote: post #89

Confused what to make of the comments here. Access to court lists has always been free and open, it's just a pain in the ass to work with. The lists contain nothing much of value beyond the names involved in a case and the type of hearing It's not easy to see who to believe. The MP introducing it claiming there is a "cover up" is just what MPs do. Of course it makes him look bad, a service he oversaw the introduction…

Would you mind elaborating on this new replacement system?

I may have misread: https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/courts/government-suspe...

> “We are also working on providing a new licensing arrangement which will allow third parties to apply to use our data. We will provide more information on this in the coming weeks.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#118

Post by mellosouls »

harel wrote: post #104
mellosouls wrote: post #8

The title appears to be somewhat misleading. The counter claim by the government is that this isn't "the source of truth" being deleted but rather a subset presented more accessibly by a third party (CourtsDesk) which has allegedly breached privacy rules and the service agreement by passing sensitive info to an AI service. Coverage of the "urgent question" in parliament on the subject here: House of Commons, Courtsde…

They made the data accessible though. From what I can gather, before them, the data was only accessible via old windows apps. If the source of truth is locked and gated, what good is it?

You can get the daily court listings for free online. I would assume this service just provided a ux-friendly front end,etc. which in the clip the minister says they will be replacing.

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#119

Post by closewith »

jjk166 wrote: post #95
whizzter wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open to research yes. Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks. AI firms have shown themselves to be playing fast and loose with copyrighted works, a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that would otherwise have been expunged after a few years.

> Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? You're conflating two distinct issues - access to information, and making bad decisions based on that information. Blocking access to the information is the wrong way to deal with this problem. > a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that woul…

> Blocking access to the information is the wrong way to deal with this problem.

That's an assertion, but what's your reasoning?

> This would be a perfect example of something which should be made open after a delay. If the information is expunged before the delay, there's nothing to make open.

All across the EU, that information would be available immediately to journalists under exemptions for the Processing of Personal Data Solely for Journalistic Purposes, but would be simultaneously unlawful for any AI company to process for any other purposes (unless they had another legal basis like a Government contract).

Re: Ministry of Justice orders deletion of the UK's largest court reporting database

#120

Post by mschuster91 »

reactordev wrote: post #72
whizzter wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open to research yes. Free to ingest and make someones crimes a permanent part of AI datasets resulting in forever-convictions? No thanks. AI firms have shown themselves to be playing fast and loose with copyrighted works, a teenager shouldn't have their permanent AI profile become "shoplifter" because they did a crime at 15 yo that would otherwise have been expunged after a few years.

>”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 expunge…

> 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).

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