My company hired a new employee recently and as part of my responsibilities, I ran a basic background check for our new hire. If you've never seen a professional background check, you will most likely be shocked by the level of detail that can be gleaned from public records.
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For fun, run a background check on yourself: What appears to be "mundane" when you read it about someone else, feels shockingly personal when it's about you. With a quick search on a name and Social Security number, I am able to get a report with enormous amounts of detail. I am able to find the current address of a person, their phone number and whether they own their house. I also see the current appraised value of that house and the names of everyone else living at that address, and everyone who lived there in the previous 10 years. I get the addresses of the 10 nearest homes, the names of those neighbors and their phone numbers. I then get the "family and neighbors" for every address the person has listed, going back as far as possible, sometimes to their birth. I see every car owned, every house, boat, aircraft or firearm; every traffic ticket, creditor, bank account.

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