How to remove an entry from Boston Herald database A Boston Herald database posted information about government employees' salaries here. Can a person named in the database remove their entry?
That would require a change in the law. Names and salaries of public employees have been held to not be highly personal information exempt from the public records law. See Attorney General v. Collector of Lynn, 377 Mass. 151, Hastings &amp; Sons Publishing Co. v. City Treasurer of Lynn, 374 Mass. 812. This is part of the "diminished expectation of privacy in matters relating to their public employment" attaching to public employment.
The written document is given very high priority, so parties will be held to what is in the document. Both parties sign at the bottom, as a way of signalling their agreement with the terms specified in the document. If conditions are added or subtracted (by crossing out), especially with pre-printed forms, the "customer" (person who didn't write the contract) can initial such modifications, as a way of clearly signalling that they indeed agree to the deletion of such-and-such clause. Since both parties have a copy of the signed agreement, this is not strictly necessary. The potential issue would be that an unscrupulous person could cross out a clause after the contract was signed, and claimed that they aren't bound by that clause. A comparison of the two copies would then reveal that the unscrupulous person was attempting fraud. There is nothing special about handwriting in or crossing out conditions, except that it poses a potential evidentiary problem as to what exactly was agreed to, if for example one party threw away their copy and then maintained that the crossed-out clause had not been crossed out. (So, keep your copy). In case you are proposing a scenario where one party is unaware of a change, i.e. at the very last minute Smith crosses something out and signs it, and Jones did not see that happen, then both copies would be the same and Jones would be legally bound to what's in the paper. Smith should announce to Jones that a clause was being deleted. We might suppose that there are innocent reasons why Smith made changes without making an announcement to Jones, in which case the parties do not have an agreement. There may be amicable ways to deal with that situation, but push could come to shove, in which case the written form of the document is generally taken to be the most important piece of evidence (though not always the only admissible evidence, unless you're in Colorado, Florida or Wisconsin).
As a US Citizen, you don't get a I-94 recording of entries and exits but : The FOIA site of the CBP, mentions Information Regarding Entry and Exit Note: CBP does not have records on the entry and exit of persons arriving or departing the U.S. before 1982. To be filled with CBP However, this doesn't mentions if this is only applicable to Aliens or US Citizens are included or not. But this CBP help page mentions travel records for US Citizens
As was mentioned in a comment, in the United States, businesses are generally registered at the state level. The information collected, and the extent to which or manner in which the public has access to it, varies from state to state. There may still be states where that's a paper-only process, but I'd guess in most of them it's accessible online, at least for basic information. For example, in Michigan the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs has a Business Entity Search tool. If a business deals directly with consumers, it may be a member of the Better Business Bureau. Even if it isn't, but consumers have complained about it, the BBB will make public the information it has about the purported business. If a company is publicly traded (that is, it's corporation that issues stock, and the stock is traded on a stock exchange), it is required by law to be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC's EDGAR tool will display the company's filings, which should include annual and quarterly reports. If the company is or wants to be a government contractor, it generally needs to register with the General Services Administration, and certain information about successfully registered entities is publicly viewable in that system. (Conversely, the same system also lists "Excluded Parties" who are prohibited or partially restricted from doing business with the government.) Depending on what the business does, it may also be subject to registration with and regulation by additional state or federal agencies. For a full picture, however, unless you're dealing with the obvious agent of a Fortune 500 company, you'll probably want to get information from a private credit-check service as well; for example, as also mentioned in a comment, Dun &amp; Bradstreet for the business itself, or for a really small business a personal credit report on each of the owners and officers.
My understanding is that &quot;the record&quot; only refers to the official record of the proceeding, e.g. the transcripts that would be kept on file and used as the basis for formal decisions. Such records are usually prepared after the fact by a court reporter based on their shorthand notes or audio recordings, so this indicates that the reporter should simply leave out the statement in question when creating those records, perhaps replacing it with a marking saying &quot;(stricken)&quot; or something of the sort. &quot;Stricken from the record&quot; doesn't indicate that the statement is to be kept secret or scrubbed from all history in some Orwellian fashion, merely that it should not be considered in any legal decision-making process (e.g. a judge's ruling). The decision should be made as if the statement had never been uttered. Anyone else in the courtroom -- lawyers, journalists, members of the public -- is free to remember it, write it down, publish it, shout it from the rooftops, or etch it into stone tablets, if they wish. No penalties exist for doing so. I also don't think there is any requirement to delete it from the court reporter's preliminary notes or audio recordings; again, only from the final official transcript. (There could be other situations where it is forbidden to record or divulge what was said: secret grand jury proceedings, material under seal, gag orders, etc. But those would all require some sort of regulation or order outside the usual meaning of the phrase &quot;strike from the record&quot;.)
Given a large database of email addresses that you can't prove have given consent to receive email, the only legal thing to do with it, is to (securely) delete it. (I am going to switch your question about a larger company to a bank: in the UK, big pharma is forbidden from advertising to individuals.) In principle the rules are the same for a huge bank and everything down to a self-employed plumber. In practice the plumber will be told "don't do that again" rather than fined. This case was treated under the Data Protection Act, which has a maximum fine of £500,000&nbsp;&ndash; so a big bank would probably have been fined more, but not necessarily much more. Under GDPR, fines are related to turnover, so the fine would be a lot bigger for a large bank. The incident is a year old now. Details here.
To what degree are such emails admissible in court as evidence, and what weight do they carry? Your own statement, when offered by you as evidence, is hearsay, unless it comes within an exception to that rule. Recorded recollection might be one of the better exceptions. There is also a chance that you could get it in as a business record of the company if you were using a company email account and the company stores all of its email communications. The documents also sometimes come in to provide fair context for a conversation with a party-opponent's statements that are admissible. It appears that Canada does not follow the modern British rule (which repealed the hearsay rule in civil cases in 1995), which if it were available, would come in without any difficulty at all. But, Canada does have what it calls a "principled exception" (which is somewhat broader than the parallel U.S. residual hearsay exception) that is generally available if the document can be shown to be reliable and there is an unavailable witness, or if there proponent of the document can show that it is reliable and necessary for other reasons. Even if the document itself is not admissible since it is hearsay, you could still testify as to what the boss said from your own recollection, and then have your lawyer ask you why you are sure that this is what was said. You would answer that you contemporaneously wrote a confirming letter to the boss spelling out what was said and you reviewed it to refresh your recollection before testifying at the hearing or trial. These kinds of confirming letters are used quite frequently in business and employment litigation. And, in my experience, these statements tend to be surprisingly effective and persuasive, because, while they do not foreclose the possibility that the person writing it was lying or inaccurate in the confirming email account, it does rule out the possibility that you forgot exactly what was said, and you provided the boss with an opportunity to dispute you which the boss didn't feel an obligation to correct. If one party has a coherent account in confirming emails of what was said, and the other party is trying to remember what happened a year or two earlier without notes from the witness stand, the person with the coherent, documented account is almost always going to come across as more credible unless the other side can show that your confirming emails are not infrequently gross misrepresentations of what really occurred. (I've also dealt with witnesses like that now and then.)
are employers legally allowed to punish (e.g. fire, reprimand, etc.) an employee who shares wage/salary information with their colleagues? No. Section 8 of the BC Labour Relations Code preserves for the employee &quot;the freedom to communicate to an employee a statement of fact [...] with respect to the employer's business&quot;. More conclusively, section 64 entitles a person to disclose --except for purposes of picketing-- &quot;information [...] relating to terms or conditions of employment or work done or to be done by that person&quot;. Wage/salary information clearly is a condition of employment. the only answer to that question relies on a law from a different province (Ontario) and so is not relevant in BC. That answer is relevant to Canada (also the question was about Canada). That answer cites a statute from Ontario because that is the jurisdiction that the asker specified. It would be tiresome as well as futile to provide the statutory equivalent of every province on a matter that the provinces are very unlikely to legislate materially differently.