There is a new FREE service that allows you to look up a person's name in order to see if he/she has a criminal record. Sounds great until you discover that a traffic ticket is shown as a criminal offense IF THE COMMUNITY REPORTS TRAFFIC VIOLATIONS.
Records may be incomplete and what about people with the same name and no way to differentiate them?
If the advanced feature is used, and it should be, then you can enter birthdays or age range as well as state, etc.
I tried a few names of people I know and one came up with aliases untold and the same name was listed in many places. Since I knew the birth dates were wrong, it made no difference to me BUT WHAT ABOUT A COMPANY WANTING TO HIRE WHO DOESN'T HAVE THE CORRECT BIRTH DATE?
This may be useful to check out someone you are thinking of using as a helper, but remember that computers are only as good as the information provided to them.
If you want to read the article itself, click the word article. If you want to try the site, click here
Plenty of privacy issues involved here; what do you think?
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2 comments:
I have a friend who graduated from UTA with a bachelor's in computer science. He went to work for EDS, but not without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. He has a fairly common name and EDS withdrew their job offer 3 days before he was supposed to report for his first day. The reason? He had a violent criminal record in Denver, Colorado. Nevermind the fact that he had never in his life even driven through the state of Colorado, let alone Denver. It all turned out okay, but only after he hired a private detective to prove that it wasn't the same person.
It almost makes me want to name my children Bartholomew and Cornelius, or some other uncommon name so their chances of being mistaken for someone else are reduced.
Unfortunately too few people realize that incorrect information may be circulating about them. Your friend was fortunate to discover the problem and then to have the means and knowledge to prove it erroneous.
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