Some of this information may seem mundane, depending on your personal definition, but an unscrupulous person can use details that may seem trivial to you to put together a profile that they could use to commit fraud by catfishing. These data brokers will often display a good bit of information for free, and provide lots of other information, including legal and criminal records, for a fee. Many of these sites offer the user access to email, phone number or other identifying information (sometimes even your Social Security number) and things like your date of birth, home address, previous residences, your home's valuation, the names of your relatives, your religion, your ethnicity, hobbies, places of employment, sites where you have accounts and a host of other personal details. These sites take legally available information and build profiles that they make available online. If you've searched for your own name and found information about yourself on the first page, chances are you're seeing results from sites called people finders. Many laws restrict how much information can be shared by an individual agency, but with a little from here and a little from there, someone can put together details and build a public profile about you. Now with a little know-how, time and energy, it's much easier to collect data that most people consider sensitive or even private. If William had had Zillow, there would have been no need for the Domesday Book.īefore everyone had access to the internet, someone would have had to go to the appropriate records offices (or in some cases mail a request) to get that information. The laws differ by location on what must be made available, how much and when, but at least in the United States it's probable that some, if not all, of those details are legally available. Government data including vital records, tax information, voting details, salaries of government employees and more are required to be public by law. This makes working with and sharing that information easier for everyone. Nowadays, many records are created digitally or digitized for easier access. Of course, those records were handwritten and few people could read, making access to the general public essentially nonexistent.
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