I recently called a reputable agency to book an appointment and the person on the other end asked me for my phone#.  When I gave my #, the operator new my name and booked my appointment.  While I feel customer service is great, I am leary that this company has my information stored this way.  Do you think they would erase my record from their database if I asked them to?  Could that become public record if this agency has LE issues?  Any thoughts on this?

When an agency gets busted the computers get hauled in for a look-see, records are checked, etc. It's all part of the overall investigation. Since there are maybe hundreds of names and ph#'s available, it's not practical or necessary to follow up on each and every one. The fact that they have this information is mostly irrelevant since they can't charge you for something that you did in the past without evidence, and a phone number and name, or even if an appointment is documented is typically not enough to prosecute you.

The problem comes when a local newspaper or TV station gets the information and publishes/broadcasts it, which is fairly common these days. That's actually the bigger risk, and any information they have can be made public.

Erasing the record is harder than it might seem, as well, since even if they delete the info it's still on the hard drive and that's what they examine. Probably not the news you were looking for....

into a "search function" and that brought up your information.  These programs do exist.

A computer expert may correct me if I'm wrong:   the best way to erase information is to edit it & replace it with fake details & then re-save it.  The new details then overwrite the old info.

-- Modified on 11/20/2008 3:27:25 PM

Sorry but this is not true. In many cases, the new information will be written elsewhere. This leaves the possibility to recover the information if you erase it by mistake. The only way to be sure is to perform a low level reformat of the hard drive.