Technology: Truthfinder.com
Demo leader: Md Momen Bhuiyan
Summary:
Truthfinder is a commercial website for people search in the US, especially for finding information about “long lost friend” or “scammers”. This is a fairly new website started on March, 2015. Anyone can search the website using a person’s name or a phone number. They claim to have millions of public records from local, state and federal databases as well as independent sources. Due to the Freedom of Information Act these public records are available to anyone but collecting these information from multiple sources is hard. So truthfinder like websites make it easy to search. There are two types of membership in this site: one is regular and the other is premium. Premium users get more information about a person like: Educational information, Current and former roommates, Businesses and business associates, Voter registration details, Possible neighbors, Traffic accidents, Weapons permits etc. Most of these information are just possible match and doesn’t guarantee the correctness.
Reflection:
The site has a list of purposes it can or can’t be used. But anyone can misuse this for the purpose of screening candidate, stalking etc. During search it shows the records might have various type of information which could be a way to scam people into registering in the site. The average review of the website is below 3 [1]. Some suggested the information was either not accurate or several years old or can be gathered from google search. Only thing that was better was the opting out option which is mandatory by the FTC [2]. Still this site can be used by the journalists for verification purpose.
How to use:
1. The website has 5 options for searching: People Search, Criminal Records, Court Records, Reverse Phone Search, Deep Web Search.
2. Other than the reverse phone lookup option all them require the name of the person along with an optional location information.
3. After the search button is clicked it will ask the gender of the individual.
4. Then shows some graphics with a list of things its searching and ask if the relevant person’s location information.
5. After that a list of possible matches are shown along with location, age information of the match.
6. If the option of open report is clicked for a matched name it will show some further processing, an alert that the information might potentially be embarrassing and agreement on usage policy
7. After that it will go to the page for user registration where you have to give your name, email address and payment information
The whole process takes longer than five minutes.
[1] https://www.highya.com/truthfinder-reviews
[2] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/media-resources/protecting-consumer-privacy/enforcing-privacy-promises
