Individual Reference Services

The booming demand for personal information has spawned a new multibillion dollar industry known as individual reference services-we’ll call them look-ups for our discussion. Look-ups employ thousands of people, researching and inputting data, to supply personal information about individuals to attorneys, marketers, credit suppliers, financial institutions, and investigators. These companies compete to assemble ever larger and more comprehensive databases of personal information.

Rapid innovation creates awesomely powerful search techniques, combining and sorting information from multiple separate databases to produce a comprehensive personal information report. Instead of different searches for each important piece of data, a single search now presents a compilation of information from different sources. One look-up service claims that it takes any individual name and runs it through a thousand separate computer databases with more than 100 billion stored records. According to the company, the average report length is 100 pages.

One hundred pages is a lot of information about you and probably covers just about everything you wouldn’t want someone else to know. Besides the commonly available records of Social Security number, date of birth, and mother’s maiden name, additional information also may include: place of birth, names and ages of family members and neighbors, schools attended, telephone numbers (listed and unlisted), employment information (past and present), physical characteristics, licenses held, voter registration information, driver’s license number, automobile registration, personal identification numbers, association membership, census information associated with the addresses, and asset ownership. A newspaper archives search for any articles with your name may be included in the report.

The information compiled by the look-up services is derived from three principle sources:

1. Information which you have supplied.
2. Information from the public record.
3. Information from proprietary sources.