Please pardon my noisy choice of music, but this song pegs my blog here. I feel stripped.
A few weeks ago, I saw a national commercial from beenverified.com that’s encouraging everyone out there to run a background check on everyone else. In order to log use this site’s free trial, I had to use my credit card. When I created an account, I found that my information was confused with another person’s who shared my name and their information and mine was mixed with theirs. This upset me on many levels. First off, I never gave them consent to display the correct information they had. Secondly, they had a section which would give information as to whether or not I’ve ever committed a crime. This area said “highly unlikely”, which is far from saying I’m law-abiding and if anyone is paranoid to run this, I wonder what they’d imagine if there was even a hint of skepticism of my innocence.
Abruptly, I contacted this company and told them that their information on me is no good and that I wanted it removed or I would sue them. I also asked them to remove information they displayed on my father and mother. Then I wrote a letter to the rest of my family on how they can do the same for themselves. The company informed me they would comply by blocking access to my information to anyone who used their service and in the future, I might want to be careful to be sure the companies I do business with don’t have permission to share my information. Here’s a newsflash: unless they were secretive about it, no company I do business with has my permission! Perhaps they stripped the phone book? I don’t know and while it’s true most of us are listed in a phone book, the phone book never advertises the ability to dig into the deepest remnants of our identity to find information that would tell someone who may have no business searching whether or not we’ve even committed a crime. I can understand a persons desire to know these things, but I also think that if you’re put into a situation where you’re either about to be intimate or need to place trust in a person that one would be wise enough to ask around or use logical judgement rather than rely on a technical algorithm that may have vomited up a heaping serving of incorrect information.
We’ve come to an age where we can’t sign up or log onto any service that doesn’t think the information we put within it becomes their commodity as soon as we consent to use it. A trusted business partner to one corporate entity could very well be the company willing to pay for nationally or even internationally broadcast time to air commercials that claim to know every hair on your head and that for a nominal price, provide it to anyone. You may not care in the end, feeling this is all futile, but you should ask yourself: will everyone who wishes to possess this information use it appropriately? Lawfully? Can any company vouch for all their costumers because they’ve chosen to trust them with what they presume to be their credit card information? Why aren’t we protected by this?
In any service you elect to use, you should read the user agreement, seek out the privacy settings and become familiar with how to control what others see. Be willing to spend the time to read, to learn, while also being vigilant and adamant. Your identity and credibility is yours to protect.
