"Celebs are able to change their personal information, so they cannot be traced under their own name."

Wait, so all men are created equal, except for celebrities? I missed that discussion in ethics class. How famous do you have to be exactly? Quite a few people know me, do I count? maybe if 10000 people know me, does that count? 100000? What if you're famous in Argentina, does that count for Netherlands? What about notoriety-famous, Canoeist John Darwin perhaps, he's famous, can he hide his details?

How famous do you have to be to be allowed a free murder for example?

If 80000 people has access to this information then everyone has, because only 1 leak is needed and you have 80000 possible leaks.

Which dumb sh*t came up with that one. If celebrities need to be able to hide then there is a problem with releasing this information this widely and it should not be released.

"...stresses that no phone numbers can be found in the database"

Well gee that's a relief! If this person writes to me pretending to be a doctor quoting all my medical details and asking me to ring 01938575 urgently about my medical condition, they'll soon have number too!

Idiots.

"are those for real?" once for all... And as for the gents, it could bring new economies of scale in pharmaceuticals marketing.

is that they can make the same huge screwups at the same time in multiple countries around the world, and no amount of protestation from People With Clue (pwc?) will stop them. Not for the foreseeable future anyway.

Dave,

Does this work in practice? How easily do companies cooperate with these requests for information about onesel? I am interested in obtaining (and hopefully deleting) my data held by Kroll.com submitted for a job application.

Since you can take a taxi to the hospital and your health insurance company will sometimes pay the bill, taxi drivers have to have access to the database too. Sure, not all taxi drivers, but still, that's how open we Dutch are about the data on 16 million people...

And about changing details for celebs: it doesn't work. There is no form you can fill out, there no website where you can change details, there's no special phonenumber. You can phone the general customer desk, and they will tell you not to change anything because it's so cumbersome (for you and them).

What's more: you are not told that your data is being stored this way, let alone that you are asked for permission.

Vincent Dekker, one of the authors of the article in the Dutch daily Trouw

One more fact: we've been naughty for quite some time now.

But no, no punishment for anybody so far...

I'm Dutch and i work in a hospital. Here too you are entitled to see your entire medical file but you cannot delete (parts of) it due to legal reasons.

You are in deep doo-doo, my friend. Kroll is staffed by ex-CIA and ex-FBI people and you can guess the rest. Just make sure you have a bag ready-packed with lots of sun-block lotion. You'll need it at a certain non-Cuban seaside "resort" on the Cuban side of the island !!