Slashdot Mirror
A Background of a 'Background Checker'
pamri writes "The Times of India profiles Jay Patel, of Abika, a firm that specializes in background checks, personality profiles, satellite or aerial Photos of any location besides other services in the US. It is now venturing into other countries including Canada and India.
Abika is already facing protests from Canadian Privacy groups for breaching the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act"
"It is now venturing into other countries including Canada and India. Abika is already facing protests from Canadian Privacy groups for breaching the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act"
So in other words. Privacy (getting around) is being outsourced.
Welcome to the Brave New World. Hope everyone brought an antacid?
I actually remember that the CBC did a piece on this topic. Here's the video.
And that's exactly what companies do when they interview you. I have personally had three interviews and found that typically *after* you have the interview a Google referrer shows up in your logs from the interviewing company.
I know one guy on IRC that interviewed with a company and they spent a good amount of time passing around the link to his gallery (mostly pertaining to the pictures of the large gauges in his ears).
One interviewer checked my site before I came in (and I knew it) and he said that they didn't hire pot smokers. He assumed I was a pot smoker because I was a Grateful Dead fan.
Just remember that you may or may not be hired due to interpretations of your "web presence" regardless of whether or not it's actually how you live your life.
Other comments have said basically that anyone whose company's not based in country X doesn't have to abide by the laws of country X when acting within the borders of country X. Granted, aerial photos is a bit of a grey area, but within the concept that in order to take a picture of Canada to that resolution, you'd pretty much be intentionally invading Canadian airspace, at least in principle, then it's pretty much like jaywalking in Germany but saying that since you're American, you don't have to abide by German laws.
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Lawson believes Canadian privacy law should apply to Abika since it is selling Canadians' information about themselves, but there are hurdles because the firm is based in the United States.
In the UK we have strong data protection laws as well. However, many companies that take our data make us waive the right by saying that we are aware that the data may be moved outside the UK (Bank call centres in India?) and our rights do not apply.
I guess that these may not have been tested yet and may be like click-through EULA that may not always stand up, but our privacy is being gradualy eroded away to whichever country has the weakest privacy laws.
Okay, so let me get this straight. A company is searching through and compiling publicly available information, and then making some TheSpark-style random conjectures based on these data?
Where is the expectation of privacy here? Do I have a (reasonable) expectation that data about me on the internet are private? Even my grandmother can tell you that that's ridiculous. This is the cyberspace equivalent of looking through my garbage, not breaking into my house. I hope this action falls on its face, because people providing information aggregation of all kinds are a very valuable, growing part of the coolness the internet has to offer and I want to encourage them in any way possible, even if it does mean that someone might know I bought a USB Christmas tree off ThinkGeek.
Two qualifications, though:
adam b.
yes, but how would canada enforce this law if they never set foot in Canada. extridition? I don't think that would sit well with other governments.
Philosophy.
Actual conversation:
"Dad, did you write something about masturbation on the web a long time ago?"
"What? No! Waitaminute, yes. Not on the web, on a newsgroup. But it was just a metaphor! It was about intellectual masturbation."
"My friends think you're so cool!"
Who knew when we were writing that stuff 15 years ago that it would be around FOREVER?
P.S. How did I know what she was talking about so fast? A former student of mine tracked me down one day. The first thing he said was, "Hey, I read that thing of yours about masturbation." I had no recollection of it so I went and looked it up.
Behold the riant ape! Beware, his crooked thumbs!
Of course, intra-bus cultural nuances get complicated once you extrapolate them to the Internet and get professional about all this snooping.
More than mere navel gazing.
This guy is doing it here, but as the off shore trend increases the information is going to become more available to potentially hostile foreign governments.
Manage it now or pay the price later. We're already paying the price with companies like this one cropping up. This is nothing less than domestic spying.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I can never find myself on Google, even with my full name. Sometimes not even with the city I'm in.
All those years bemoaning the mundanity of my name, and it turns out it may someday become my greatest defense against the All-Seeing Eye of Google
I havn't seen anyone mention this yet, but this was the first thing I thought of.
Pay a couple bucks to this company, get complete background on someone, and then take over their life....you now know everything about them and their past, you don't even have to create things. This means that anything you say about your past can be verified as true.
The other thing that really got me going was this comment...
"Patel questions the need for restrictions on personal information, saying lack of data about people is what breeds fear and ignorance. "Most people don't care about privacy. It's the media that makes it a big hype.""
I'm sure that there are LOTS of people that care about privacy...why do you think we have curtains on our windows?
Zro . two
"I come from Canada...they say I'm slow....eh?"
I think the principle is that unless there is a good reason not to allow it, everybody should be able to petition their courts when they are treated unjustly. After all, their local courts are the ones which they would tend to trust to judge their case fairly (since they comply with local views of right and wrong and civil rights).
When a sensitive issue of diplomacy is involved, the local state department or equivalent may file briefs with the court to address these issues as well. Once a judgement is made, the foreign government can choose whether or not to obey it, and the local executive branch can decide whether or not to seek to force the foreign goverment to obey it.
For countries with similar principles of justice and civil rights this probably works out fine most of the time. It tends to work out less well when one country is a democracy and the other is a dictatorship, or something like that. Unless the democracy wants to go to war or impose heavy sanctions (which only work so well, and may lead to war), things are pretty much in the hands of the dictator.
Note that one of the big areas of controversy surounding the International Criminal Court is the concept that individual countries would give up their power to veto a judgement of this court. In the USA, for instance, supreme court justices are appointed by a US-elected president and confirmed by a US-elected senate. An ICC justice would have a much more murky selection process, and the US would certainly have fairly little influence over their selection. To a US sentator asked to ratify the necessary treaties, the question is "why appoint somebody we have no control over to have power over US citizens, when the international court gives us no benefit we don't already have?" (The ICC doesn't benefit the US much, since if Osama Bin Laden were found the US wouldn't be calling for a warrant by the ICC, they would simply transport him to America to stand justice there. It isn't like anybody is going to refuse to extradite him.)
I come top when you search google for my name.
My website has images of my tattoos, graphic mentions of my body piercings, and a lot of free software.
I'm happy if people rule me out on the ground of piercings/tattoos whatever. At the end of the day the kind of environment where those things are unaceptable (no matter how discriminatory they are) I'm not going to want to work.
I think that my achievements stand on their own technical merits.
Hopefully somebody who's looking for a Debian Administrator would get in touch despite my piercings/tattoos/etc. If not no loss.
We've just saved me and them some time on each side.
In many ways, the article and various /. comments made here are a great reminder of exactly how much personal data some of us even WILLINGLY put out there on the web. It's not that way for everyone, but I'm sure plenty of /. users, for example, have done enough stuff on the net that someone could put together a pretty good profile of the person from a Google search and some simple digging into what's found there, without having to go into anything fancy.
Heck, I'm just thinking about what I've done, and wonder how much someone could pull up about me from everything I've made available. It's a little strange to think about.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
WTF are you talking about? It sounds pretty clear to me that there is money in this - industrial/commercial money. It's a service business that could relocate to any location where the laws permit it - taking its tax dollars along for the trip. A democracy should reflect the will of its people.
Like it or not, the American people spoke loud and clear last election day and told our government that we don't mind be face-fucked as long as somebody else is getting rich. The USA doesn't have a "Data Protection Act" because the people clearly don't want it - just as they don't want their soldiers at home, they don't like the Constitution anymore, and they really don't like fags.
So seriously, wtf are you talking about? You must be talking about some OTHER country that needs a Data Protection Act - a country that has -citizens-, not -consumers- as voters; A country that lives up to a higher standard of libery and justice. Wake up - these are the Red States of America. You don't want to be a terrorist, do you? Why do you need to protect that data, hm? What library books have you been reading?
Wish I could say this was tongue in cheek, unfortunately it's far more cynical/realistic than comedic.
(Posting as AC for privacy reasons.)
1) Jay Patel is an alias for Sanjay Amin. (More on this in a bit)
2) Sanjay Amin started out a company called Entropy Systems, which offered a perpetual motion machine to paying customers. This was after he defaulted from school loans at the University of Minnesota. (He left the university and the state due to some disagreements with the university about his engine)
3) Using the millions of dollars he bilked out of various people and organizations primarily in the Youngstown area, Entropy Systems disappeared and became www.abika.com, a site that offered free eBooks. See the Wired article for details about the transition.
4) After deciding that free eBooks weren't very profitable, Abika.com went through various transformations until it made it to its current state of being a background investigation website.
5) To avoid connections with his questionable past, Mr. Amin now goes by the name Jay Patel.
6) Abika.com sells a combination of reports from an astrology CD-ROM that Mr. Amin has, plus actual reports from private investigators that he re-sells (without a license).
So how about that, Sanjay? How do you like your privacy now?
My sister got a major internship this past summer. After a few days, her new boss mentioned something about "What's this about how you can balance a stack of twelve books on your head and gargle entire scenes from "The Phantom of the Opera?""
Of course these had never been mentioned, but her boss had googled her name and found her college dorm website with a picture of her balancing a textbook, pizza box, bottle of laundry detergent, a bottle of soda, and a board game on her head all at the same time, along with the program from a dorm open mic night (where she did, indeed, gargle a scene from "The Phantom of the Opera." Luckily, her boss thought this was cool, instead of scary - but it could have gone the other way.