ChoicePoint
| Choicepoint
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| legal form | Public Company ( NYSE ) |
| Seat |
Alpharetta , Georgia United States
|
| management | Mark Kelsey |
| Number of employees | 5,500 |
| sales | 1 billion US dollars (2006) |
| Branch | Service company |
| Website | www.choicepoint.com |
ChoicePoint is a US company that specializes in collecting data about individuals or companies. This data is sold to governmental and non-governmental organizations. ChoicePoint not only obtains this data from various publicly accessible sources, but also from private databases.
The company is estimated to have 17 billion individual sources with a total of 250 terabytes of data. There are said to be more than 220 million people already entries, including very confidential information, for example about criminal records, drug tests or the possession of shares. The data will be resold to approx. 100,000 customers, of which approx. 7000 will be public or state institutions (as of March 30, 2005).
ChoicePoint has recently come under fire when hackers managed to gain access to confidential data and use it improperly. Obtaining information about non-US citizens for the US government is also very controversial.