Stocks are at near record levels. That’s not enough for some corporate CEOs, who want more giant tax cuts

The Business Roundtable is an association of more than 200 CEOs of America’s biggest corporations. It likes to think of itself as socially responsible.

Last Wednesday, its chair, Joshua Bolten, told reporters that his group planned to drop “eight figures” while “putting its full weight behind protecting and strengthening tax reform”.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com

Courtauld Gallery, London
‘Take our picture, mister!’ they shouted at Mayne, who not only captured children on the streets of postwar London, but helped turn photography into an art form

In its 92-year history, the Courtauld Gallery in London has never acquired or exhibited photography – until now. Its inaugural exhibition is Roger Mayne: Youth, devoted to some 60 works by the self-taught British photographer best known for his documents of working-class children on the poor and battered streets of postwar London.

When trying to open up programmes to new audiences, photography is a natural step for any institution that has previously ignored the medium. Mayne seems a safe choice for a gallery known mostly for its collection of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings, one its usual audiences might not balk at. They might compare Mayne’s populated group shots to impressionism’s busy scenes of people at leisure. Even the ideas of the impressionists somewhat inform Mayne’s approach to documentary photography – the notion that there is a difference between what is in front of you and what you see.

This 1940s Brazilian home, filled with items reflecting the eclectic taste of its owner, is as breath-taking as the view

I’ve always dreamed of living in front of this view. I think it’s such a luxury to have this postcard in my living room,” says Isabela Capeto of her flat overlooking one of Rio de Janeiro’s most iconic landmarks: the Sugarloaf Mountain.

A fashion designer, Isabela moved here eight years ago. She was completely mesmerised by the view and also fell in love with the original vintage style of the 1940s building, which has wooden parquet floors in two shades, as well as high ceilings and lots of light coming in through the large windows.

London gallery shows intimate images, including portraits of the artist, that reveal a great talent in her own right

Dora Maar is renowned as Pablo Picasso’s “weeping woman”, the anguished lover who inspired him to repeatedly portray her in tears. Now a London gallery is seeking to re-establish her as a pioneering surrealist artist in her own right, with an exhibition showcasing photographs recently discovered in her estate.

The exhibition, which opens at the Amar Gallery in London on 16 June, will include rare surrealist photograms and intimate photographs dating from her time with Picasso. These include two extraordinary portraits of him from the 1930s and one charting the creation of his anti-fascist masterpiece, Guernica, in his studio surrounded by paint pots. The works were bought at auction from Maar’s estate two years ago and have never been exhibited in a public gallery before.

Hi-tech imaging reveals the artist tinkered with Herri met de Bles’s painting to improve the composition of figures

One benefit of being among history’s greatest artists is that if you don’t much like a painting done by someone else, you can just improve it. The Flemish master Sir Peter Paul Rubens certainly knew how to paint people; Rubenesque is still used to describe a curvaceous, ample body. So when he noticed the inferior quality of the religious figures depicted on an otherwise accomplished landscape hanging on his wall, it turns out he simply picked up his paint palette.

A newly rediscovered Herri met de Bles painting, titled The Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist in an Extensive Landscape with Travellers, set a puzzle for art historians because the style of the landscape background did not match the group of people. Hi-tech imaging of the canvas carried out by a London auction house has since “completed the jigsaw”, revealing the way Rubens had tinkered with a painting now thought to have belonged to his own collection.

The Costa-winning author describes her creative career, from embracing the arts scene in London to finding her voice as a writer in Barbados

It was the end of the 1990s, and I was in my 20s working as a legal academic at King’s College London, but I wasn’t in love with the law. I needed a change. During a sabbatical, I saw a newspaper advert for a foundation course at the Slade School of Fine Art. In a moment of madness I applied.

I arrived at the entrance interview, my hands swinging. Apparently, it was customary to offer a portfolio for scrutiny. Unfazed, I said I didn’t have one. Nor did I mention that Mrs Ali, my high school art teacher, expressly forbade me from pursuing the subject, citing a basic lack of talent. But she was 4,000 miles away in Trinidad, unable to stop me now. I told the interviewers I was enthusiastic. Would that be enough? I still don’t understand why, but they took a chance on me. I started a week later.

It was a baptism by fire, with long life-drawing sessions followed by group critiques. Every lunchtime I cried into my sandwich. My sketches were stick figures compared with the brilliantly rendered drawings my classmates produced. Mrs Ali was right: I didn’t have an artistic bone in my body. But I’d already paid a couple of thousand in fees, so contracted with myself daily to show up just one more time. The days became weeks that morphed into months. Eventually, I was hooked.

I emerged from those intense months of immersion in art and its history convinced that this was my calling. That crazy decision made me quit my job. It took me back to university, only I was now a Goldsmiths College art undergrad. This was followed by a masters in fine art at Central Saint Martins in London. Oh, and somewhere along the line we had twin baby boys.

The student on the image she took while working on a series for her photography A-level

Aleesha Coker, then 17, and her two younger sisters, Freda and Bintu, had stopped off at the corner shop for a snack on their way home from school. Coker had been working on a series for her photography A-level, shooting through glass from exterior to interior. As the girls passed by a payphone in Lorrimore Square, south London, Coker was inspired to set up a moment. She used an iPhone 12 set to portrait mode – “I don’t particularly enjoy using film cameras,” she says – and was pleased with how “the muted colours gave it an intimate feeling”.

“As their older sister, I feel a responsibility to protect them and be a role model. Freda is 13. She’s very quiet most of the time, but can be loud when she feels comfortable. Bintu is 10; she has a very bubbly character and can be outspoken. “I don’t think their expressions in the photograph necessarily reflect the excitable parts of their personalities,” she says, “but something deeper. When my little sisters gaze at the camera in this way, I’m reminded of how much they trust me.”

A teenage Riley gets to know Anxiety and Envy in the Pixar animated sequel, and Westeros descends into civil war as the Game of Thrones prequel returns

Inside Out 2
Out now
The first Inside Out gave us five personified emotions living inside the mind of 11-year-old Riley. Now a teen, Riley and her brain must contend with the arrival of new emotions, including Anxiety (voiced by Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser).

Fascinated by the objects on his mum’s fireplace and what they say about her, Orlando Gili embarked on a project to capture creatives’ collections

A mantelpiece is a place like no other. A snapshot of daily life in a home, it is solemn and esoteric, like a roadside shrine. The things that anchor us – the face of a beloved, a pebble from a favourite beach, pretty china out of reach of little hands – jostle for space with the fleeting joys of party invites and supermarket flowers. Pretty things, special things and funny things are strung together, like charms on a bracelet. Your own mantelpiece is a walk down memory lane that you can take from your sofa. Someone else’s is a set of clues to who they are.

For photographer Orlando Gili, the lure of the mantelpiece began, appropriately, at home. See the one below with the jug of parsley leaves beside mustard and marmalade pots? That’s his mum’s house. “A mantelpiece is a still life, but with so much personality it is also a portrait of the person, or people, whose house this is,” says Gili. His favourite mantelpieces are “a jumble of sentiment and appreciation of design. They belong to people with rich hinterlands.”

Co-founded before photo work was taken seriously as art, this Berlin venue is marking its half-century by celebrating the history of its collection – and the medium itself

When Annette Kicken’s late husband, Rudolf, founded a photo gallery in Aachen, Germany, in 1974, appreciation of photography as an art form was rare. Major German photographic museums, such as Museum Ludwig in Cologne or C/O Berlin, were years away from opening. In the UK, the National Portrait Gallery had only just appointed its first curator of photography. In the US, the Metropolitan Museum of Art would not establish a department of photographs until 1992. The number of galleries and collectors devoted to the medium was so small that they referred to themselves as an international “photo family”.

“It was a very, very small scene,” says Kicken, who joined the gallery in 1999. “There were very few institutional exhibitions. There was no market. Artists were forgotten, and their work was often just thrown away.”

Enlarge / To be fair, I wouldn't put it past an AI model to forget the flamingo's head. (credit: Miles Astray)

A juried photography contest has disqualified one of the images that was originally picked as a top three finisher in its new AI art category. The reason for the disqualification? The photo was actually taken by a human and not generated by an AI model.

The 1839 Awards launched last year as a way to "honor photography as an art form," with a panel of experienced judges who work with photos at The New York Times, Christie's, and Getty Images, among others. The contest rules sought to segregate AI images into their own category as a way to separate out the work of increasingly impressive image generators from "those who use the camera as their artistic medium," as the 1839 Awards site puts it.

For the non-AI categories, the 1839 Awards rules note that they "reserve the right to request proof of the image not being generated by AI as well as for proof of ownership of the original files." Apparently, though, the awards did not request any corresponding proof that submissions in the AI category were generated by AI.

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Culture ministry hopes to help people reclaim family property plundered by Franco regime

Spain’s culture ministry has published a list of more than 5,000 items plundered by the Franco regime – including paintings, sculptures, jewellery, furniture and religious ornaments – to help people reclaim their family property almost a century after it was taken for safekeeping following the outbreak of the civil war.

The inventory, which is part of the government’s efforts to bring “justice, reparation and dignity” to the victims of the conflict and the subsequent dictatorship, was posted online on Wednesday.

Throughout his life, the great German playwright made punky montages that explored how Nazism infested the country he had to flee. Why have they taken so long to come to light?

Bertolt Brecht believed that theatre should not merely entertain its audience but make them think politically. To achieve this effect, thought the German playwright and poet, a play should not be polished – but jarring. Actors should break out of character to address their audience, plotlines should be broken up and interrupted. In one memorable phrase, he described his ideal play as one that could be “cut into individual pieces, which still remain fully capable of life”.

A new exhibition at Raven Row in London shows how literal the author of The Threepenny Opera was being when he came up with that description. Curated with the Bertolt Brecht Archive in Berlin, brecht: fragments is the most extensive display to date of the visual material the playwright collected over the course of his career, from newspaper and magazine pictures to photocopies of medieval paintings and images from Chinese theatre.

Seduced by Sam Taylor-Johnson’s woozy Amy Winehouse biopic and kicked into tomorrow by Dev Patel’s Monkey Man, we replay six fantastic months of film

Anthony Hopkins stars as Nicholas Winton, the “British Schindler” who rescued 669 Jewish children from the Nazis, alongside Helena Bonham Carter on mighty form.
What we said: “The film does justice to this overwhelmingly moving event in British public life in a quietly affecting drama.” Read the full review.

Royal Academy, London
Pampered pets, polite portraits and enough wan landscapes to fill a field – this show mirrors the numbed, aimless condition of Britain after 14 years of Tory misrule

This year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is best enjoyed as a mirror of the numbed, aimless condition of Britain after 14 years of Conservative government. It is a gasping death-rattle of mediocrity, a miserable garden party of vapid good taste. There are no laughs and precious few glimpses of good art. Nothing points to the future. All you will learn from it is that the small “c” conservatism of British middle-class culture has reached the end of its rope.

“Art Is in All of Us”, affirms a typically profound placard by Bob and Roberta Smith RA. If only. That radical-sounding statement might seem to promise a show that’s a wild, democratic, free-for-all romp. After all there are more than 1,700 works of art here, apparently chosen pretty much by flipping a coin. But it is almost all the same, all tepid, polite and pointless. In the same room as Smith’s platitude is a sculpture of two model ships with the leaden one-note wordplay title Worship-Warship and a pair of ugly, kitsch ceramic deer. For a moment I thought these were examples of outsider art. Bless. They are actually by Richard Wilson RA and Cathie Pilkington RA. Either these eminent artists have totally run out of ideas or they have submitted any old random items lying around their studios.

Michael Landy’s east London installation plays on creativity of phrases such as ‘apples and pears’ and ‘chew the fat’

Would you Adam and Eve it? Cockney rhyming slang, the lyrical patter that once punctuated daily life in London’s East End, is at risk of dying out as young people abandon its use.

That is the view of one artist who wants to reintroduce the dialect to a new generation of Londoners and international visitors by drawing attention to its creative nature.

This year’s biennial takes you up tenement staircases and into city centre car parks to see fine work from Delaine Le Bas, Cathy Wilkes and Lawrence Abu Hamdan

It’s a dreich – as they like to say in these parts – afternoon in June. Four strangers are crammed into an Opel in a city centre car park, listening to the radio. A broadcast of field recordings and vocal fragments is punctuated with bleeps and static. It is a very Glasgow International (GI) experience. In this biennial, art leads you up tenement staircases, across industrial estates, through community gardens and into car parks.

The broadcast is an homage to Jean Cocteau’s film Orpheus, and composed by students in Dresden and Glasgow under the tutelage of Susan Philipsz. This most private of public listening experiences recasts you as Orpheus himself, scrutinising transmissions for hidden meaning. But as Eurydice tells him: “You can’t spend your life in a talking car.” Other delights await.

In response to the ex-Tory MP’s article, John Robinson hopes future Labour ministers have time to do their jobs properly and Peter J Atkins points out the darker side of Stewart’s beloved Cumbrian dry-stone walls. Plus letters by Ian Smith and Diana Morgan

Yet another election; yet more promises to put things right, to make everything better; yet more politicians telling us that they are listening and will enact our concerns and needs; yet more excuses and denials about broken promises and things not done; yet more politicians telling us that they are totally right and the other lot are totally wrong. Who to believe? Most of us know the country is broken. All of us know, depending on our political persuasion, who is to blame – it’s the other lot.

Yet it’s not that simple. Rory Stewart almost put his finger on it in describing that he left parliament after having five ministerial posts in four years and being unable to complete his job in any of them (I’d like to say Johnson and Brexit made me quit politics. But they were symptoms of the problem, not the cause, 3 June).

The Italian photographer on capturing a moment of peace on the Rimini riviera during a difficult time

As a portraitist and wedding photographer, Matteo Fagiolino likes to reflect his subjects’ personalities in his work. This photograph was taken after the first Covid lockdown ended, at the beach at Torre Pedrera, a town on the Rimini riviera in Italy.

“It was a summer afternoon after months of social distancing,” he says. “It had been so long since my whole family had spent the day together, it was a breath of fresh air for everyone.”

Enlarge / Light painting reveals a cloud of particulates on Airport Road, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (PM2.5 10-20 micrograms per cubic meter). (credit: Robin Price)

Light painting is a technique used in both art and science that involves taking long-exposure photographs while moving some kind of light source—a small flashlight, perhaps, or candles or glowsticks—to essentially trace an image with light. A UK collaboration of scientists and artists has combined light painting with low-cost air pollution sensors to visualize concentrations of particulate matter (PM) in select locations in India, Ethiopia, and Wales. The objective is to creatively highlight the health risks posed by air pollution, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

“Air pollution is the leading global environmental risk factor," said co-author Francis Pope, an environmental scientist at the University of Birmingham in the UK who spearheaded the Air of the Anthropocene project with artist Robin Price. "[The project] creates spaces and places for discussions about air pollution, using art as a proxy to communicate and create dialogues about the issues associated with air pollution. By painting with light to create impactful images, we provide people with an easy-to-understand way of comparing air pollution in different contexts—making something that was largely invisible visible."

Light painting has been around since 1889, when Étienne-Jules Marey and Georges Demeny, who were investigating the use of photography as a scientific tool to study biological motion, created the first known light painting called Pathological Walk From in Front. In 1914, Frank and Lillian Mollier Gilbreth tracked the motion of manufacturing and clerical workers using light painting techniques, and in 1935, Man Ray "signed" his Space Writing series with a penlight—a private joke that wasn't discovered until 74 years later by photographer/historian Ellen Carey in 2009.

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The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today levied fines totaling nearly $200 million against the four major carriers — including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon — for illegally sharing access to customers’ location information without consent.

The fines mark the culmination of a more than four-year investigation into the actions of the major carriers. In February 2020, the FCC put all four wireless providers on notice that their practices of sharing access to customer location data were likely violating the law.

The FCC said it found the carriers each sold access to its customers’ location information to ‘aggregators,’ who then resold access to the information to third-party location-based service providers.

“In doing so, each carrier attempted to offload its obligations to obtain customer consent onto downstream recipients of location information, which in many instances meant that no valid customer consent was obtained,” an FCC statement on the action reads. “This initial failure was compounded when, after becoming aware that their safeguards were ineffective, the carriers continued to sell access to location information without taking reasonable measures to protect it from unauthorized access.”

The FCC’s findings against AT&T, for example, show that AT&T sold customer location data directly or indirectly to at least 88 third-party entities. The FCC found Verizon sold access to customer location data (indirectly or directly) to 67 third-party entities. Location data for Sprint customers found its way to 86 third-party entities, and to 75 third-parties in the case of T-Mobile customers.

The commission said it took action after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter to the FCC detailing how a company called Securus Technologies had been selling location data on customers of virtually any major mobile provider to law enforcement officials.

That same month, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that LocationSmart — a data aggregation firm working with the major wireless carriers — had a free, unsecured demo of its service online that anyone could abuse to find the near-exact location of virtually any mobile phone in North America.

The carriers promised to “wind down” location data sharing agreements with third-party companies. But in 2019, reporting at Vice.com showed that little had changed, detailing how reporters were able to locate a test phone after paying $300 to a bounty hunter who simply bought the data through a little-known third-party service.

Sen. Wyden said no one who signed up for a cell plan thought they were giving permission for their phone company to sell a detailed record of their movements to anyone with a credit card.

“I applaud the FCC for following through on my investigation and holding these companies accountable for putting customers’ lives and privacy at risk,” Wyden said in a statement today.

The FCC fined Sprint and T-Mobile $12 million and $80 million respectively. AT&T was fined more than $57 million, while Verizon received a $47 million penalty. Still, these fines represent a tiny fraction of each carrier’s annual revenues. For example, $47 million is less than one percent of Verizon’s total wireless service revenue in 2023, which was nearly $77 billion.

The fine amounts vary because they were calculated based in part on the number of days that the carriers continued sharing customer location data after being notified that doing so was illegal (the agency also considered the number of active third-party location data sharing agreements). The FCC notes that AT&T and Verizon each took more than 320 days from the publication of the Times story to wind down their data sharing agreements; T-Mobile took 275 days; Sprint kept sharing customer location data for 386 days.

Update, 6:25 p.m. ET: Clarified that the FCC launched its investigation at the request of Sen. Wyden.

It’s not unusual for the data brokers behind people-search websites to use pseudonyms in their day-to-day lives (you would, too). Some of these personal data purveyors even try to reinvent their online identities in a bid to hide their conflicts of interest. But it’s not every day you run across a US-focused people-search network based in China whose principal owners all appear to be completely fabricated identities.

Responding to a reader inquiry concerning the trustworthiness of a site called TruePeopleSearch[.]net, KrebsOnSecurity began poking around. The site offers to sell reports containing photos, police records, background checks, civil judgments, contact information “and much more!” According to LinkedIn and numerous profiles on websites that accept paid article submissions, the founder of TruePeopleSearch is Marilyn Gaskell from Phoenix, Ariz.

The saucy yet studious LinkedIn profile for Marilyn Gaskell.

Ms. Gaskell has been quoted in multiple “articles” about random subjects, such as this article at HRDailyAdvisor about the pros and cons of joining a company-led fantasy football team.

“Marilyn Gaskell, founder of TruePeopleSearch, agrees that not everyone in the office is likely to be a football fan and might feel intimidated by joining a company league or left out if they don’t join; however, her company looked for ways to make the activity more inclusive,” this paid story notes.

Also quoted in this article is Sally Stevens, who is cited as HR Manager at FastPeopleSearch[.]io.

Sally Stevens, the phantom HR Manager for FastPeopleSearch.

“Fantasy football provides one way for employees to set aside work matters for some time and have fun,” Stevens contributed. “Employees can set a special league for themselves and regularly check and compare their scores against one another.”

Imagine that: Two different people-search companies mentioned in the same story about fantasy football. What are the odds?

Both TruePeopleSearch and FastPeopleSearch allow users to search for reports by first and last name, but proceeding to order a report prompts the visitor to purchase the file from one of several established people-finder services, including BeenVerified, Intelius, and Spokeo.

DomainTools.com shows that both TruePeopleSearch and FastPeopleSearch appeared around 2020 and were registered through Alibaba Cloud, in Beijing, China. No other information is available about these domains in their registration records, although both domains appear to use email servers based in China.

Sally Stevens’ LinkedIn profile photo is identical to a stock image titled “beautiful girl” from Adobe.com. Ms. Stevens is also quoted in a paid blog post at ecogreenequipment.com, as is Alina Clark, co-founder and marketing director of CocoDoc, an online service for editing and managing PDF documents.

The profile photo for Alina Clark is a stock photo appearing on more than 100 websites.

Scouring multiple image search sites reveals Ms. Clark’s profile photo on LinkedIn is another stock image that is currently on more than 100 different websites, including Adobe.com. Cocodoc[.]com was registered in June 2020 via Alibaba Cloud Beijing in China.

The same Alina Clark and photo materialized in a paid article at the website Ceoblognation, which in 2021 included her at #11 in a piece called “30 Entrepreneurs Describe The Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) for Their Business.” It’s also worth noting that Ms. Clark is currently listed as a “former Forbes Council member” at the media outlet Forbes.com.

Entrepreneur #6 is Stephen Curry, who is quoted as CEO of CocoSign[.]com, a website that claims to offer an “easier, quicker, safer eSignature solution for small and medium-sized businesses.” Incidentally, the same photo for Stephen Curry #6 is also used in this “article” for #22 Jake Smith, who is named as the owner of a different company.

Stephen Curry, aka Jake Smith, aka no such person.

Mr. Curry’s LinkedIn profile shows a young man seated at a table in front of a laptop, but an online image search shows this is another stock photo. Cocosign[.]com was registered in June 2020 via Alibaba Cloud Beijing. No ownership details are available in the domain registration records.

Listed at #13 in that 30 Entrepreneurs article is Eden Cheng, who is cited as co-founder of PeopleFinderFree[.]com. KrebsOnSecurity could not find a LinkedIn profile for Ms. Cheng, but a search on her profile image from that Entrepreneurs article shows the same photo for sale at Shutterstock and other stock photo sites.

DomainTools says PeopleFinderFree was registered through Alibaba Cloud, Beijing. Attempts to purchase reports through PeopleFinderFree produce a notice saying the full report is only available via Spokeo.com.

Lynda Fairly is Entrepreneur #24, and she is quoted as co-founder of Numlooker[.]com, a domain registered in April 2021 through Alibaba in China. Searches for people on Numlooker forward visitors to Spokeo.

The photo next to Ms. Fairly’s quote in Entrepreneurs matches that of a LinkedIn profile for Lynda Fairly. But a search on that photo shows this same portrait has been used by many other identities and names, including a woman from the United Kingdom who’s a cancer survivor and mother of five; a licensed marriage and family therapist in Canada; a software security engineer at Quora; a journalist on Twitter/X; and a marketing expert in Canada.

Cocofinder[.]com is a people-search service that launched in Sept. 2019, through Alibaba in China. Cocofinder lists its market officer as Harriet Chan, but Ms. Chan’s LinkedIn profile is just as sparse on work history as the other people-search owners mentioned already. An image search online shows that outside of LinkedIn, the profile photo for Ms. Chan has only ever appeared in articles at pay-to-play media sites, like this one from outbackteambuilding.com.

Perhaps because Cocodoc and Cocosign both sell software services, they are actually tied to a physical presence in the real world — in Singapore (15 Scotts Rd. #03-12 15, Singapore). But it’s difficult to discern much from this address alone.

Who’s behind all this people-search chicanery? A January 2024 review of various people-search services at the website techjury.com states that Cocofinder is a wholly-owned subsidiary of a Chinese company called Shenzhen Duiyun Technology Co.

“Though it only finds results from the United States, users can choose between four main search methods,” Techjury explains. Those include people search, phone, address and email lookup. This claim is supported by a Reddit post from three years ago, wherein the Reddit user “ProtectionAdvanced” named the same Chinese company.

Is Shenzhen Duiyun Technology Co. responsible for all these phony profiles? How many more fake companies and profiles are connected to this scheme? KrebsOnSecurity found other examples that didn’t appear directly tied to other fake executives listed here, but which nevertheless are registered through Alibaba and seek to drive traffic to Spokeo and other data brokers. For example, there’s the winsome Daniela Sawyer, founder of FindPeopleFast[.]net, whose profile is flogged in paid stories at entrepreneur.org.

Google currently turns up nothing else for in a search for Shenzhen Duiyun Technology Co. Please feel free to sound off in the comments if you have any more information about this entity, such as how to contact it. Or reach out directly at krebsonsecurity @ gmail.com.

A mind map highlighting the key points of research in this story. Click to enlarge. Image: KrebsOnSecurity.com

ANALYSIS

It appears the purpose of this network is to conceal the location of people in China who are seeking to generate affiliate commissions when someone visits one of their sites and purchases a people-search report at Spokeo, for example. And it is clear that Spokeo and others have created incentives wherein anyone can effectively white-label their reports, and thereby make money brokering access to peoples’ personal information.

Spokeo’s Wikipedia page says the company was founded in 2006 by four graduates from Stanford University. Spokeo co-founder and current CEO Harrison Tang has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Intelius is owned by San Diego based PeopleConnect Inc., which also owns Classmates.com, USSearch, TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate. PeopleConnect Inc. in turn is owned by H.I.G. Capital, a $60 billion private equity firm. Requests for comment were sent to H.I.G. Capital. This story will be updated if they respond.

BeenVerified is owned by a New York City based holding company called The Lifetime Value Co., a marketing and advertising firm whose brands include PeopleLooker, NeighborWho, Ownerly, PeopleSmart, NumberGuru, and Bumper, a car history site.

Ross Cohen, chief operating officer at The Lifetime Value Co., said it’s likely the network of suspicious people-finder sites was set up by an affiliate. Cohen said Lifetime Value would investigate to determine if this particular affiliate was driving them any sign-ups.

All of the above people-search services operate similarly. When you find the person you’re looking for, you are put through a lengthy (often 10-20 minute) series of splash screens that require you to agree that these reports won’t be used for employment screening or in evaluating new tenant applications. Still more prompts ask if you are okay with seeing “potentially shocking” details about the subject of the report, including arrest histories and photos.

Only at the end of this process does the site disclose that viewing the report in question requires signing up for a monthly subscription, which is typically priced around $35. Exactly how and from where these major people-search websites are getting their consumer data — and customers — will be the subject of further reporting here.

The main reason these various people-search sites require you to affirm that you won’t use their reports for hiring or vetting potential tenants is that selling reports for those purposes would classify these firms as consumer reporting agencies (CRAs) and expose them to regulations under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).

These data brokers do not want to be treated as CRAs, and for this reason their people search reports typically don’t include detailed credit histories, financial information, or full Social Security Numbers (Radaris reports include the first six digits of one’s SSN).

But in September 2023, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission found that TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate were trying to have it both ways. The FTC levied a $5.8 million penalty against the companies for allegedly acting as CRAs because they assembled and compiled information on consumers into background reports that were marketed and sold for employment and tenant screening purposes.

The FTC also found TruthFinder and Instant Checkmate deceived users about background report accuracy. The FTC alleges these companies made millions from their monthly subscriptions using push notifications and marketing emails that claimed that the subject of a background report had a criminal or arrest record, when the record was merely a traffic ticket.

The FTC said both companies deceived customers by providing “Remove” and “Flag as Inaccurate” buttons that did not work as advertised. Rather, the “Remove” button removed the disputed information only from the report as displayed to that customer; however, the same item of information remained visible to other customers who searched for the same person.

The FTC also said that when a customer flagged an item in the background report as inaccurate, the companies never took any steps to investigate those claims, to modify the reports, or to flag to other customers that the information had been disputed.

There are a growing number of online reputation management companies that offer to help customers remove their personal information from people-search sites and data broker databases. There are, no doubt, plenty of honest and well-meaning companies operating in this space, but it has been my experience that a great many people involved in that industry have a background in marketing or advertising — not privacy.

Also, some so-called data privacy companies may be wolves in sheep’s clothing. On March 14, KrebsOnSecurity published an abundance of evidence indicating that the CEO and founder of the data privacy company OneRep.com was responsible for launching dozens of people-search services over the years.

Finally, some of the more popular people-search websites are notorious for ignoring requests from consumers seeking to remove their information, regardless of which reputation or removal service you use. Some force you to create an account and provide more information before you can remove your data. Even then, the information you worked hard to remove may simply reappear a few months later.

This aptly describes countless complaints lodged against the data broker and people search giant Radaris. On March 8, KrebsOnSecurity profiled the co-founders of Radaris, two Russian brothers in Massachusetts who also operate multiple Russian-language dating services and affiliate programs.

The truth is that these people-search companies will continue to thrive unless and until Congress begins to realize it’s time for some consumer privacy and data protection laws that are relevant to life in the 21st century. Duke University adjunct professor Justin Sherman says virtually all state privacy laws exempt records that might be considered “public” or “government” documents, including voting registries, property filings, marriage certificates, motor vehicle records, criminal records, court documents, death records, professional licenses, bankruptcy filings, and more.

“Consumer privacy laws in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia all contain highly similar or completely identical carve-outs for ‘publicly available information’ or government records,” Sherman said.