Last week, I received a note from a viewer of my WABC Tech Guru segments asking how someone might have gotten hold of her Social Security Number (SSN) and other personal data. Instead of answering that myself, I turned to my people-finding guru, Duff Wilson of The Seattle Times (I recommended his Who is John Doe — and where to get the paper on him site in a July 2003 column).
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Within minutes of my forwarding my query to him, I got this response:
Some people don’t like this, but:Comments or reax to this? Please post them here.
You can get SSN’s, current and previous home addresses and phone numbers, and same for relatives and former housemates, and so on, all at Accurint.com and other people-finder websites. Accurint is the most “user friendly.” For more people finders, see PowerReporting.com.
These are essential tools for finding people and connections between them, by financial institutions and private investigators as well as journalists and other skip-tracers. Previous addresses and connections are usually based on credit report headers.
But, as mentioned, people find that scary. I can understand why. It can be abused, though it seldom is.
The best known crackdown on this type of information was the Drivers’ Privacy Protection Act, sponsored by Sen. Barbara Boxer, mandating states close down routine access to driver license information. The justification was to prevent stalkers from using those records to harass people. Ironically, the legislation closed the driver records to journalists, but not to private investigators. It was a private investigator who got a driver license address for an obsessed fan of an actress (Rebecca Schaefer) who then killed her. This incident sparked the outcry.
SSN’s remain the de facto national identification number, and realistically, there’s no way to put that genie back in the deep freeze.
Know of a site that helpful to journalists? E-mail me at poynter@sree.net (please include your name and affiliation).
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