Re: Privacy? Run a background check on yourself

Hello, 

I should start with a disclaimer stating that I work for Garlik [1], one of the companies which I am going to talk about below. 

<snip/> 

On 19 Oct 2010, at 22:24, David Singer wrote:

> I have no idea how I would go about doing that.  Who would I ask, what would I expect to pay, and so on?  Examples, anyone?

There is a company in the US called Reputation Defender[2], that compiles a report about you, and information about you in the public domain. They have a pay for commercial product, which lists websites which mention you, and give some sort of metric that states whether or not you are being mentioned in a positive or negative light - at a level of granularity of thumbs up, thumbs down, and neutral. 

We at Garlik (W3C members/startup) have a commercial product called DataPatrol[3] which is intended as a financial fraud alerting service, where by we inform our customers of any accidental or malicious exposure of their personal information. We search: Public Websites, Compromised and stolen data sources traded on the internet ("dark interwebs"), Births, Marriages and Deaths register (UK), Electoral Roll (UK), and Royal Mail redirect database (UK). We are currently predominately in the UK, but we have started branching out into Germany, Italy, and the US. We released an interactive map thing[4] which highlights all of the alerts we have sent out to our customers in the last 90 days. 

Note that, we started out with a product which showed people all of the data about them which we could find, in the form of a reputation management tool, but this was deemed to be uninteresting to our users, and the service has involved into one which alerts users when they expose too much personal information to the public domain. Personal information including, national insurance numbers (~ SSN in the US), home addresses, personal phone numbers, banking details, etc ....


> 
> On Oct 19, 2010, at 14:16 , Perez, Aram wrote:
> 
>> From the middle of the article: “If you want to learn more about privacy run a background check on yourself with a reputable online provider. Once you see what's out there, you will probably want to see stronger privacy laws.”
>> 
>> The complete article at <http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2010/101910antonopoulos.html>.
> 
> David Singer
> Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.
> 

Mischa

[1] http://www.garlik.com/
[2] http://www.reputationdefender.com/ 
[3] http://www.garlik.com/products.php 
[4] http://www.garlik.com/map/ 
___________________________________
Mischa Tuffield PhD
Email: mischa.tuffield@garlik.com
Homepage - http://mmt.me.uk/
Garlik Limited, 1-3 Halford Road, Richmond, TW10 6AW
+44(0)845 652 2824  http://www.garlik.com/
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