Personal Privacy is a universal human right, and this should apply for everyone regardless of past mistakes.

At Record Fixer, we are really serious about personal privacy. Too often, individuals have to worry and struggle to ensure that their background checks are clear of This isn’t a criminal issue; it’s a privacy issue, and therefore a human rights issue. For minor run-ins with the law, individuals should have the right to determine who knows about that past.

Privacy is recognized in the UN Declaration of Human Rights as a fundamental human right. That means it shares the same position of prime importance as the right to personal property, right to work, and to enjoy a reasonable standard of living. Sadly, when sensitive information is too accessible from background checks, all these rights can be jeopardized. Contrary to the UN declaration, the digital world that we inhabit continues to make it harder and harder for individuals to secure these right for themselves if minor infractions and legal items persist on their records, and for the person who wants to proactively clean their record on ALL the existing databases out there, it can become a nightmare.

If you were convicted of a felony, employers, with your consent, can check your background and make decisions about hiring you based on what they find. But what about minor arrests, and other legal items that were tossed out? There are laws in place to protect people from discriminating against you for a job or housing based on past arrests or charges, and there’s a word for being denied these basic human rights because of such items: it’s an injustice.

As we said, this is not a criminal issue. Systems are in place for individuals with minor legal issues to clean up their records in the eyes of the law. The fact that the information stays out there is a privacy issue. We must ask ourselves whether people who have had interactions with the law should to be in control of their privacy and reputations in the same way that others are. Are we as a society OK with allowing private companies who store information in their own databases to be able to have the upper hand in controlling this information?

At Record Fixer, we feel that it’s time for good people to get access to help they need. Our tools help ordinary people stand up for these rights, and to not have to live in fear of having their lives continually affected by activities that the legal system had long ago deemed over and done with. The digital world of record databases is continually changing—it’s time for privacy protections to change too.