ChoicePoint, the massive data broker made infamous for selling 163,000 customer records to identity theft fraudsters, is on a comeback tour. On Sunday, the New York Times ran a 3,400 word piece extolling the company's new found embrace of privacy practices and its courting of longtime critics of its data practices. It's the best press the company's gotten since the Federal Trade Commission fined the company $10 million and required it to set aside an additional $5 million for victims of its negligence.

Just this week, ChoicePoint president Douglas Curling presented ChoicePoint's new image to law students at Stanford and Berkeley and met with lawyers at the online civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

More on what's changed and the long history that ChoicePoint wants you to forgive after the jump...

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Update: Read this too.

Curling also said that society needed to learn to be more forgiving of past mistakes that come to light through background checks, but said that companies are afraid of hiring people with any spot on their record due to the threat of civil litigation.

That's a fine sentiment, and ChoicePoint is clearly hoping that the first one that gets to be forgiven for its past mistakes is itself. As for the Joes and Janes of the world who might have shoplifted or passed a bad check and can't get a job now, Curling suggested Tuesday that their forgiveness will have to wait for either litigation reform or a really tight job market.

This is so fucked up. I don't know what else to say.

Companies that buy this data and refuse to employ or do business with people who have some poc mark in their past claim they have to do this in order to avoid liability. Of course, liability can only exist because the data is available and so failure to access it could be considered negligent. The data is available because Choicepoint makes it available. Choicepoint could refuse to sell data that is more than 5 or 10 years old, because unethical, but they don't, because its profitable, because of the liability, which is created by the fact that they sell it. Now they claim that they wish people were more forgiving, in the same breath that they ask forgivness for their own fuckups. How these people sleep with this tangle of contradictions is extremely hard for me to understand.

Litigation reform? Actual litigation is not required before lawyers will act skitish. Why don't we just make it illegal to traffic in this information? Oh, I forgot, they're funding Senators.