by Adam Tanner
Inside, the atmosphere differs little from that of a typical startup. Computer engineers tap away on their keyboards in a large open space ringed by sparsely decorated offices. By 2014 bustedmugshots.com had gathered more than forty million arrest records. For most of the company’s history it made money in part by charging people to pull their files from the service. That, understandably, outraged some of its targets, who think such a service is little more than an extortion racket.
Paola Roy and Janet LaBarba are just two of millions whose images appeared prominently in Internet searches thanks to Prall’s company. Images posted by users on Facebook, Flickr, or other sites typically do not have the same sophisticated coding as Busted! uses, so they fall lower down in Internet searches.
Prall says he is performing a public service by publicizing the photos and helping those arrested on minor charges by allowing the removal of images. “We’re not forcing you to pay for anything,” Prall says. “To me it’s not a dagger in the heart. It’s a public record: it belongs to the public.”
With twelve million to fourteen million arrests in the United States every year, most commonly for drugs, theft, and drunk driving, Prall has plenty of public records to chase, plenty of people to humiliate.9 In total, the FBI maintains fingerprints and criminal histories on seventy-six million people.10
Prall defends posting images of people like Roy, even for such trifling matters. “We do not feel it should be up to us to decide which cases are worthy of meeting a nebulous standard of ‘serving public good,’ so we instead allow the citizens to make those kind of judgment calls themselves,” he says. “Unlike the traditional media that cherry-picks the cases they cover based on their marketability, we make as much information as possible without filtering or putting an editorial spin on the incident. Of course, some cases will be more serious than others, but that is a very subjective standard that we do not feel is our place to define.”
Why do local agencies provide Busted! any mug shots at all? Government bodies have long distributed public records in an effort to provide openness about their activities. Each US state and court system maintains its own open records rules, but for many decades they have collected an increasing amount of personal documents and typically made them available to the public.11
Before electronic records, obtaining a personal record or a mug shot required going down to a city office or courthouse to fetch the record manually, or making a request by mail, a process that could take weeks. Nowadays, many of these documents are instantly available.
Prall has developed a routine to vacuum up mug shots. Using a polite tone, he demands that local police departments provide him photos. If that fails, he drafts appeals and complaints to supervisory state boards. His relentless requests irritate many. “I deal with a lot of distasteful people, and he’s right at the top of that list,” says Les Moore, legal adviser to the Irving, Texas, police department. “This guy’s been a pain in my backside for a number of years.” Bustedmugshots.com tells visitors that it is “a valuable asset to local law enforcement” that has led to breakthroughs in crime investigations. Many local officials disagree. They object to the site’s profit motive. And though they do not show much sympathy for the lawbreakers in their jails, they do not necessarily believe in public shaming either. Mostly, however, they don’t believe the site offers much of a public service.
Like others in the Wild West of the Internet age, Prall is testing the limits of the business of personal data, where secrets are harder to keep than ever before. “I wonder what Kyle Prall tells his family and friends that he does for a living. Does he tell them that he deliberately tries to hurt others so that he hopes to profit from the pain he induces?” wrote Eric Turkewitz, a New York lawyer who maintains a blog on legal issues.12
Legal experts say future court cases and legislation may curtail some of the traffic in personal data. Claire Dawson-Brown, assistant district attorney in Travis County, Texas, where Busted! is based, says she is concerned that criminal data sites sometimes have incorrect information and are not forced to comply with state expunction orders to destroy certain cases from the criminal records. “If you get arrested for a felony offense, it can ruin your life,” she says. “Now that this information is out there, it is ever more horrific for people to get their lives back together. . . . How do you get this garbage out of there?”
Although he is open about his criminal past, Prall understands the sentiment. He is sensitive to the impact of his own checkered youth. In 2010 he asked the Illinois governor for clemency regarding his drug felony conviction. “My felony conviction has made it very difficult for me to obtain a job in many areas of business that I am trained for, and also hurts my chances for future advancement in my career,” he wrote in his petition.
Prall’s high school friend-turned-informant shares similar concerns, albeit in more colorful language. He condemns Prall for shaming people on the web. “He could fuck with people’s careers. Come on, you could have a job for ten years and then all of a sudden his mug shot pops up and they did not know about it and they lose their job because of it,” he says. “I’ve got a kid, I’ve got a job. I don’t need my job knowing that I was arrested. I mean, I lose my job, I lose my house, you know? How am I supposed to support my family now because somebody wants to blackmail me with putting my shit up on Google? I mean, it really is unethical, it really is.”
Anyone can sell personal information on the Internet and affect millions of lives. With few regulations governing their activities, entrepreneurs have set up a number of mug shot sites in recent years. Busted! has become a leader in a field where the major players typically stay hidden, their stories unknown. Prall at least had the courage to tell his story in depth and in plain sight, unlike most of the others who traffic in damaging personal data.
In business terms, Prall has succeeded in gaining attention and building a base for the future. Already by late 2012, he said people were clicking on the site two million times a month, and more than one hundred thousand subscribers paid $8.99 a month.13 Prall was spending $15,000 a month just to operate a call center in Costa Rica. The company also employed seven people in the Austin office.
Prall and Ryan Russell said they would like to transform their company into a major source of citizen tips to help solve crimes, a sort of Internet version of John Walsh’s television program America’s Most Wanted. To this end they created a new website, bustedgrid.com, which advertises itself as a “crime information network” allowing users to look up arrest reports and related information such as criminal incident maps of neighborhoods and sex offender alerts. “The mug shots are a hook to get the public interested,” Prall says. “There’s got to be some kind of hook.”
Prall nonchalantly ignores criticism and ridicule of his work. Russell, however, admits to being less thick-skinned and more worried about transforming the firm into a more useful criminal data site. “In a perfect world we wouldn’t remove anybody,” he says. Russell thinks Busted! is a cut above the other mug shot websites, of which there are quite a few. “Did it begin as something that was lowbrow? Yes, we did. Can we transform it to a beacon of integrity? I think we can,” Russell says. “I don’t think we are in the mug shots space. We’re in the criminal data space.
“In five years you’ll see Kyle’s name more in the lights of John Walsh rather than—what’s the name of the guy at Hustler?—Larry Flynt.” Walsh, the father of a boy who was brutally murdered in 1981, says his long-running television show has led to the capture of more than 1,200 fugitives.
After I met Prall, officials at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department showed me around the booking station, where they process arrests. A steady stream of detainees, each with hands cuffed to a chain around the waist, arrived in a corner of one room. A police official in front of a computer captured the images with a mounted digital camera. Three bright lights on the ceiling illuminated the scene. One man had no previous record but was caught driving with a suspended license. O
thers had extensive drug and criminal records. A captain in the central booking bureau emphasized that his department does not cooperate with Busted! Staff provide mug shots only to recognized media outlets on a case-by-case basis.14 He made it clear he found such online businesses distasteful. At least as far as mug shots are concerned, what happens in Vegas really does stay in Vegas.
Kyle Prall at the state capitol in Austin, Texas, in front of portraits of state legislators. Source: Author photo.
In late 2012 Prall traveled to Las Vegas. Like so many others, he was hoping to realize a dream. For him the goal was not winning in the casino but gaining respectability by attending a Crime Stoppers conference. He met with law enforcement officials to convince them that Busted! could help in the fight against crime. He left the event so enthusiastic that he issued a press release. “Our participation in the event was a great experience. Crime Stoppers understood the Busted! Grid vision and fully embraced what we are doing,” he wrote.15 Soon afterward he started calling Busted! “the premier crime information network.”16
Despite the upbeat words, 2013 turned out to be a rather difficult year for Prall. Class-action lawsuits against mug shot websites gathered force.17 Leading credit card companies said they would stop processing payments to remove mug shots, and Google changed its search results to give less prominence to these images. The long-running tabloid television show Inside Edition hunted Prall down in Austin to confront him about his website.18 During this whole time, Prall was mostly silent. He had always kept a low public profile, but in 2012 he had agreed to share his story for this book. He had visited me at Harvard that year, and we had participated in two public lectures together. I had also visited him in Austin. But in 2013, he went incommunicado except for an occasional email. Finally, at the end of that year, he got back in touch.
Busted! had changed its policy, he said. The company would display all new mug shots for fifteen days; those of violent or serious offenders would stay up for thirty days. After that, people could opt out of having their records appear in search engine results free of charge, although subscribers to Busted! could still view the record.
“We made the change in part for the merchant processing difficulties we were experiencing, and the frivolous lawsuits,” he said, referring to the credit card payment issues and legal challenges. “The decision was also based on the fact that this has been our plan all along, to stop charging for removals.” Prall had told me that was the long-term plan when we met in 2012. Along the way, he had tested the limits of personal data on the Internet and caused a lot of pain. But in at least one regard, he had succeeded: his job was not boring.
13
Internet Advertising
The Stranger from the Land of No Advertising
The unflattering photographs and arrest details form both the core product and advertising content of mug shot websites. Most businesses embrace a far subtler approach toward personal data. On the other end of the spectrum, Internet advertisers often ignore names and customer profiles, and focus on trying to figure out what groups of people should see their messages. This field, known as “online behavioral advertising,” is grabbing an increasingly large share of the hundreds of billions of dollars companies spend annually urging the masses to buy.
In recent years the field has attracted experts with deep knowledge in harvesting and interpreting personal data—people like Claudia Perlich. Her upbringing seemed especially unlikely to land her at a New York advertising firm at the center of this revolution in advertising. She grew up in Gera, a rail junction town more than 120 miles southwest of Berlin, on the closed side of the Iron Curtain.
When she was just a year old, East Germany’s socialist government did away with advertising altogether. The country did not want to promote the crude consumer culture of the West—and in any case, it did not have the consumer goods to fulfill public demand. In 1976, after tantalizing viewers with offers for everything from denture cleaning products to automobiles, the German Democratic Republic aired its last television commercial.1 Even by the austere standards of the Soviet Union, East Germany set a restrictive example.
Growing up, Perlich viewed notices of upcoming cultural events but nothing that would encourage citizens to buy anything. In a country where citizens had to wait for more than a decade before they could purchase a hard-plastic Trabant car, ads made little sense. “There was no need for advertising because there was a very simple decision process: you either bought what was available or not,” she says.
One day in 1989, when she was fifteen, Perlich learned on television that authorities had opened up the Berlin Wall. East Germans could travel freely for the first time. A few months later, Perlich and her family made their maiden journey to West Germany. She walked amazed through giant malls in Cologne, a rich city of pedestrian shopping streets—all that enclosed space, endless rows of consumer products, and escalators that transported visitors into wide open areas!
Many middle-aged East Germans lost their jobs and suffered through a difficult transition in the following years, but Germany’s reunification gave Perlich a wealth of new opportunities. She went to university in the western half of the country, near Frankfurt, and stayed with a relative to save money. Although she had been learning Russian since third grade, she later switched to English, which she mastered well enough to receive a PhD in information systems at New York University.
Perlich developed a passion for analyzing huge quantities of data to make sense of the world: “I love playing around with data,” she says. “I don’t care if it is yeast genomes, movies, or people’s browsing histories.” As an IBM researcher from 2004 to 2010, she studied patterns for a range of projects, helping to better predict breast cancer, identify pneumonia patients, and develop predictive models of what movies people will like. Her data-mining work earned her a series of prestigious prizes. All these projects relied on using large amounts of data to predict what would happen in the future. The data scientists at Caesars in Las Vegas use a similar approach to study gambling habits and spending patterns to craft offers luring people back to the casino.
“I always need examples first. I can’t find terrorists unless I’ve seen five thousand first. I’m only as good as the data,” she says. Piecing together clues like Internet use and other habits, she can easily puzzle out personal attributes such as sexual orientation. When too many factors are uncertain, her models break down. She cannot predict whether you are going to eat pizza next Friday, nor does she know what the stock market will do in the future.
In 2010, she took on the full-time task of improving advertising delivery, the very embodiment of the consumer capitalism so conspicuously absent from her childhood. That year she became chief data scientist for Media6Degrees in New York, one of dozens of new advertising technology companies that have emerged in recent years.
Targeting Ads
Media6Degrees, which became Dstillery in September 2013, analyzes how people surf the Internet to target the right advertisements to the right people at the right time. The firm’s clients include Kraft, CVS, Wendy’s, HP, Sears, Tropicana, Hertz, Kellogg’s, Domino’s Pizza, Microsoft, Toyota, and Saks Fifth Avenue.2 If the company is placing ads for a shoe store, it studies what sites the best shoe buyers visit. Staff may detect a pattern among certain fashion and beauty blogs and other shoe-related sites. Personal details such as household income and geographic location, key to direct marketing, do not matter in this context—the only thing that’s relevant is how people surf the Internet. “If you do something that other people who bought lipstick do, I’ll try to sell you lipstick. People’s actions speak a lot clearer about who they are,” Perlich says.
To deliver ads, Perlich has computers follow what millions of Internet users do, score their behavior, and decide whether to serve them ads on particular topics.3 This machine-based analysis of vast quantities of data lies at the heart of the fast-growing field of online behavioral advertising. How exactly does Perlich know what anyone is doing
on the web, let alone those visiting any one of a hundred million web pages? Through the magic (or, some might say, sorcery) of transparent one-pixel images, sometimes called web beacons, which are embedded into web pages. Such images allow companies like Dstillery to store a simple file called a cookie on your computer with a random number they have assigned you.
Only the website you are visiting has the ability to save a cookie on your hard drive. If you read the New York Times online, only the NYTimes.com server can store cookies (unless you set your browser settings to refuse them). If you go to eBay, eBay and perhaps others working with the site will store cookies. The sites will also ask your browser for their own cookies from past visits, but they cannot get access to cookies from other websites.
Dstillery can join the action only if it is working with the website. Then it can look for past cookies it recognizes on your computer and save what is called a third-party cookie. The third-party cookie allows Dstillery to recognize the same browser if the user goes to sites with which the firm has data partnerships, as well as to marketers running ad campaigns with them.
Much like a person looking at the windows of a house across the street, the technology allows Dstillery to see only some of your Internet activity. One might notice the person in the house in front of the right window on the ground floor, then some time later see him pass a window on the opposite end of the house, and then perhaps upstairs. The outsider would not know what the house dweller did between the times he or she passed by these windows. Similarly, Dstillery does not know when Internet users surf to the many sites with which they do not have data-sharing arrangements. But Dstillery can view ten million websites, as if peering into many different buildings with thousands of windows each. Typically, Internet users have no idea what companies are able to see when they visit a page. However, some browser plug-ins allow the data hunted to find out who the data hunters are. For example, a plug-in called disconnect.me shows a series of circles around each website representing ad firms such as DoubleClick, Facebook, and many others. It is often surprising how large this cluster of circles around the site turns out to be.