data protection – Tim Boucher

According to the internet, the Akashic Records are a kind of magical record of everything that ever happened, is happening or will happen. Wikipedia quotes Alice Bailey in 1927:

The akashic record is like an immense photographic film, registering all the desires and earth experiences of our planet. Those who perceive it will see pictured thereon: The life experiences of every human being since time began, the reactions to experience of the entire animal kingdom, the aggregation of the thought-forms of a karmic nature (based on desire) of every human unit throughout time.

The inestimable “Crystal Links” references an associated myth:

“A Chinese man named Sujujin was reported to need only the first name of anyone to access the Akasha and describe their life history.”

From a privacy and data protection perspective, this sounds pretty alarming. Why aren’t adequate security measures in place? Why haven’t the known risks been mitigated? Who is responsible in the event of a data breach? What rights do I have as a data subject to not be included in this so-called “Book of Life”?

Countless pathways to infringement of PII (personally identifying information) have been laid out by careless Practioners in books such as Linda Howe’s How to Read the Akashic Record.

For thousands of years, mystics, masters, and sages from various world traditions have read the Akashic Records-a dynamic repository that holds information about every soul and its journey. Once reserved for a “spiritually gifted” few, this infinite source of wisdom and healing energy is now available for readers everywhere to answer questions big and small.

If you ask me, giving free and unrestricted access to just anyone to the universe’s vault of secrets about every person creates a major vector for harassment, hate postings and many other types of abuse.

I reached out to AKASHIC RECORDS LIMITED via their LinkedIn profile to find out what they were doing to bring their systems into compliance in advance of the GDPR coming into force on 25 May, 2018. I have yet to hear back from them. To be on the safe side, I also reached out to LIFES AKASHIC RECORDS LIMITED, also a UK company. I’m uncertain which of these organizations, if any, are responsible for this mess. For what is supposed to be the biggest database in the Universe, I couldn’t even find an official website.

I’m in no way a licensed private investigator. I’m not even sure that I would want to become one. But I have been exploring a bit how this works, and sort of the lore around it.

One thing I’ve always been curious about around the PI-types as we see represented in media, is these “special” databases we sometimes see, where they can do “deep research” onto a person — or say look up license plates. ? Minor boring stuff like that.

Turns out there is a whole industry around that, which I won’t pretend to be very versed in. Around this topic, I found two main documents which referenced maybe a dozen or so variations on public record searches as a paid “information service,” and from those have basically boiled down the ones that have piqued my curiosity the most being LexisNexis Accurint and Thomson Reuters Clear.

Outside of PI-types, we see a lot of materials marketed towards also people who do legal research, some social media searching, and fraud detection and prevention and others (not to mention criminal investigation, which is outside my interest area). ?

This first video from Thomson Reuters is fun because it makes use of the “crazy wall” TV trope:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJDkoF8_oLE

And one from the many different Accurint videos out there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0te8ER9xUw

The privacy/data protection cross-over on these videos should be pretty obvious. In another one from TLOxp, we hear the mention of public records “plus proprietary technology”:

It doesn’t seem to be the most discussed topic ever, but I would wager that for certain of the information services operating in this space, that at least a few of them must be purchasing and correlating data from other agencies, such as the dreaded data-brokers.

It’s something I’ll continue researching and publishing about, as the subject seems vast, deep, and curiouser and curiouser the further in you go…

Questionable content, possibly linked

Tag: data protection

Public records databases used by Private Investigators

Tag: data protection

Is the Akashic Record a massive violation of privacy?

Public records databases used by Private Investigators