>”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 expunged or removed from record, just removed from any decision making. The timeline for this can be based on severity with things like rape and murder never expiring from consideration.

There needs to be a statute of limitations just like there is for reporting the crimes.

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.

Also, courts record charges which are dismissed due to having no evidential basis whatsoever and statements which are deemed to be unreliable or even withdrawn. AI systems, particularly language models aggregating vast corpuses of data, are not always good at making these distinctions.

> Not expunged or removed from record, just removed from any decision making.

This made me pause. It seems to me that if something is not meant to inform decision making, then why does a record of it need to persist?

> There needs to be a statute of limitations just like there is for reporting the crimes.

The UK does not have a statute of limitations

> I think it should be removed from consideration. Not expunged or removed from record, just removed from any decision making. The timeline for this can be based on severity with things like rape and murder never expiring from consideration.

That's up to the person for the particular role. Imagine hiring a nanny and some bureaucrat telling you what prior arrest is "relevant". No thanks. I'll make that call myself.

That seems compatible with OP's suggestion, just with X being a large value like 100 years, so sensitive information is only published about dead people.

At some point, personal information becomes history, and we stop caring about protecting the owner's privacy. The only thing we can disagree on is how long that takes.

> 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).

[flagged]