What can strangers find out about you online? If you think that Googling your name will turn up everything, guess again. Your life is more of an open book than your think.
Google doesn’t tap into the extensive world of personal information that lives just out of reach of search engines. Remarkably detailed information about your personal life resides in databases maintained by the government, corporations and publications, and all of it is publicly accessible.
Everything from the price you paid for your house or apartment to your political leanings is out there on the Web for anyone to see.
Although Google can’t yet do a deep dive in these databases, this world of public records is no secret to companies known as “data brokers” that harvest all this information and package it for sale. Companies like Intelius, Acxiom, WhitePages and ZabaSearch compile your name, address, real estate records and legal records into an easy-to-use report and then sell it in the form of a background check. A comprehensive report containing all of your publicly available information is worth $49.95 to Intelius.
But here’s the thing. You have the same access to public information that the data brokers do. To see what others can find out about you, run a background check on yourself.
Your phone number and address. Search your own name in AnyWho, WhoWhere or 411.com. If your address and number comes up, it is a simple matter to combine that information with Google Maps. In just seconds, any curious stranger can not only find out where you live, they can see a picture of your house from the street or from outer space.
Your real estate records. New York City residents can see what the neighbors paid for their house by searching the Automated City Register Information Service (ACRIS, http://www.nyc.gov/acris/). ACRIS is a database that contains property records from all the boroughs, including deeds and PDFs of mortgages. Outside New York City, county clerk offices usually maintain the database of real estate and tax assessment records that detail values, sales records and in some cases ownership.
Licenses. If your job requires a license — and occupations as different as barber, landscaper and teacher all do — then the details of that license are available to anyone who wants to look at them. In New York state, the public can double-check on your claim to be a certified public accountant by searching the New York State Division of Licensing Services to see if you’re in good standing.
Political donations. If you want to see if your boss is a Democrat or Republican, the New York State Board of Elections allows anyone to see political party registration. (You will need to know the person’s date of birth and county of residence.) And the Federal Elections Commission operates the Campaign Finance Disclosure Portal, a searchable database to see who is giving money to candidates. It’s pretty obvious who Donald Trump and George Clooney are writing checks to, but you can see who your favorite celebrity is bankrolling by searching the Federal Election Commission’s Individual Contribution Search.
Business records. The state secretary of state keeps the books on businesses operating within New York, which are open to the public. To see who runs that mysterious psychic-reader operation down the block, unearth the name of the business owner in the records from the New York State Corporation and Business Entity Database.
Legal and criminal records. Before you give your phone number and house keys to your latest flame, it might be a good idea to see if they did time in the pen.
The New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision locks down the details of prisoners past and current via its Inmate Population Information Search.
So, is there any way to keep this information private?
Although you can’t control the information about yourself that makes it to the public record, you can make it harder for strangers to gather it.
The Web privacy site Safe Shepherd, for instance, gives some suggestions of ways to opt out of listings. For $14 a month, the company will scrub your data from the sites and then monitor the Web for any additional mentions of your personal information.
Also, Web browsing services like Anonymizer allows you to surf without leaving a footprint. And to keep websites from collecting information about you as you move from one website to another, install the free browser plugin Ghostery.
That will stymie online snoops who want to know where you go and what you buy.
Law librarian Don MacLeod is the author of the new book “How to Find Out Anything” (Prentice Hall Press) and the editor of the monthly newsletter Internet Law Researcher.