Instant Checkmate

[Miztaziggy]

Just been reading some news story about drink driving in the US. At the bottom, it has an advert:


So I went to their webpage:
http://www.instantcheckmate.com/

I thought this must have been a hoax site...this seems to be confined to the US as far as I can see, and not available in the UK, so may not be of interest to anyone here, but I found it pretty shocking what's available in the US.

I have 2 American friends on Facebook, so I thought I would type one of their names in and see what came up.

The guy I know is called Spencer Guy, from Texas area.

The search runs for a while then shows this:


The relatives are correct, the ones on this top match are his relatives.
If you click on his name, it does some more searching, and comes up with a page to pay, but it shows a map on the right centred in Dallas, where he lives and works.




The actual report could be fairly mundane I suppose, but something about all this feels very wrong to me. It seems that anyone in the US can snoop on anyone they want.

[darkember]

That is shocking

[VTRDark]

It don't surprise me really in this day and age and the amount of data floating around. What's naughty about it is that it's available easily for anyone to access. But if they have it in the States, then give it 5 -10 years and it will be here just like everything else they have. Maybe they will label it as something for employers to check on their employees. They may as well add all the social networking sites to the search as well. Identity fraud would be a good business to be in these days.

It's seriously scary the amount of info floating about. Actually if your willing to pay and are good at research there is already a fair amount of info that can be gathered on people in the UK on various sites and via public records. Once you have a bit of the jigsaw you then have enough info to gather another bit of the jigsaw and so on and so on.... Before you know it you have a lot of info on someone. All this technology does is make it easier as we freely divulge info openly across various networks. Even things one may consider innocent like date of birth, interests etc.

(:-})

[Keith]

Finding info about people over there is very easy if you know where to look. I lived in Maine for about a year but during a visit back to England a friend of mine in America was getting nuisance phonecalls. So from this country just going by the phone number of the caller I was able to find out who it was and after a quick payment managed to pull up all of his information. I got full criminal records (yes he had previous as a pedo), full name, address etc. It turned out his sister was living 3 three doors down from my friend who received these calls.
So I just made one phonecall to a mate who went to pay him a small visit. Funny really as he never dared to make any more calls

Sad to say that no way as a member of public I should have been able to get all of this information so easily. Pretty scary really.

[Wicky]

http://www.192.com/people/ You can find out a lot already in the UK if you pay a small fee or even just use google. If a criminal case has been published in a newspaper then it will be relatively easy to find if the case and the name of person is published on the internet. Just google "Charlie Cooper" as an example;-) http://bit.ly/13UOcSW

Since 1997, US states have begun to make criminal history records publicly available over the Internet.

I managed to track down an old French girlfriend who I'd lost touch with, she was working in publishing in the US and a client had used her maiden-name in a blog about the book he was writing - he passed on a message to her and soon we we're back in contact.

[tony.mon]

http://www.192.com/people/ You can find out a lot already in the UK if you pay a small fee or even just use google. If a criminal case has been published in a newspaper then it will be relatively easy to find if the case and the name of person is published on the internet. Just google "Charlie Cooper" as an example;-) http://bit.ly/13UOcSW

Since 1997, US states have begun to make criminal history records publicly available over the Internet.

I managed to track down an old French girlfriend who I'd lost touch with, she was working in publishing in the US and a client had used her maiden-name in a blog about the book he was writing - he passed on a message to her and soon we we're back in contact.

And when do you get to meet the children you didn't know about, and start paying for them?

It happens here, too.
I used to work for a company that would, as a routine part of their recruitment procedure, see if they could find you on social network sites.
Often there would be a picture which gave you a good idea of what the person was like off-duty....
I've wiped mine now.
One person's joke is another person's inappropriate behaviour......and they're hardly going to tell you that's why you didn't get the job are they?