Is anyone concerned that the government is selling their personal info?

Although many governments take extraordinary measures to protect their citizens privacy, what you may not realise is that in some countries anyone with a computer and a few dollars can find out virtually anything about anyone. One of the least protected countries is the US, where all information is available online for a fee. You may think that you need to go to a lot of expense or search a lot of websites to gather it all together, but that has already been done for you.

If you live in the US all of your personal information is for sale in one (rather large) database, for as little as one dollar.

This includes your property ownership details, criminal history, previous relationships, addresses, phone numbers and income records dating back many years. All of this information is collected from publicly available sources and is done within the constraints of the law.

What's more is that you don't even need to leave home to find it.

Whereas you once would have had to pay a private investigator to find out information about spouses, neighbours, employees, lovers, etc, you can now easily check out any of this information for yourself on the internet. Online background checks uncover various facets of information on an individual such as their legal name, address, workplace and so much more.

The depth of the background check will depend on the company that you use to perform such a check, and the amount of information that you want to gather on an individual. Since everything is stored on computers nowadays running a background check online (especially on yourself), can be very revealing.

• Nationwide Arrests, Convictions and Felonies

• Criminal Driving Violations

• Sex Offender Check

• Civil Judgements

• Bankruptcies and Liens

• Relatives and Associates

• Income Information

• Age/Date of Birth

• Address History

Background check companies

So where do you go to get such a check? There are a lot of different sites, and none of them really give you an idea of what results they have without either subscribing or paying upfront. Most seem to use the same database as each other, so from an information perspective it probably doesn't matter too much which one you use.

If you are budget conscious (who isn't?) it is an idea to try the cheapest ones first.

The cheapest one that I have seen has a four day trial for one dollar. Regardless of which one you use they are all subscription services, so if you no longer wish to keep using them you have to cancel your subscription before the trial period expires.

In general you get what you pay for- some of the cheaper sites require a bit more searching, but the trade off is that they are so inexpensive. It can certainly be fun (or horrifying!) to find out what information they have on you, or worse- to discover something that you weren't previously aware of about someone close to you.

One site to try is qualityinternetlinks.com who are in the process of reviewing some of the various cheap background checks and background check companies.

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