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"

Comments

Outsourcing Privacy.

[Anonymous Coward]

"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?

Re:Personality profile?

[garcia]

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.

not bound by laws? eh?

[192939495969798999]

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.

Expectation of Privacy, Revisited the 1000th Time

[Onimaru]

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:

1. I hope this site also logs visits to...this site. It would be neat to know if my prospective employer is vetting prospective employees without telling them. That would speak to their trustworthiness, I would think.
2. I also hope that the fact that their "psychological profiles" are basically for-fun-only personality tests is stated plainly. This is one place where legal weasel-words would make me very happy. This goes under the generic heading of "You can be as stupid as you want, but please don't make other people stupid, too."

Re:This was bound to happen

[Umbral Blot]

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.

Re:he just doesn't get it

[The Cydonian]

If you truly wanted to know more about someone, then open your mouth and ask that someone.

Heheh. I speak as an Indian of course, but I believe this is more a cultural thing than anything else; somehow, as the Brit-born Indian author Ruskin Bond puts it, being nosey is a sign of friendship among Indians. You can immediately notice it if you, say, enter an intra-city bus in India; you get scanned from head to toe by everyone around. Most international travellers get spooked by that, but really, curiousity is, apparently, a sign of friendship.

Of course, intra-bus cultural nuances get complicated once you extrapolate them to the Internet and get professional about all this snooping.

This is only the warm up act

[HangingChad]

Consolidating all this information off shore facilities is going to be a real boon to the Chinese and Indian governments. All that juicy data on those fat and stupid Americans. And it won't cost them a penny. They'll simply help themselves to copies. No one in the companies would dare complain or refuse.

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.

Re:Personality profile?

[abysmilliard]

This is one incident where being named Jones makes me happy.

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

Identity theft made easy...

[Zro Point Two]

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?

The inside scoop on "Jay Patel"

[Anonymous Coward]

(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?