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

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.

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?