Your online privacy is very important, but what about the privacy of your whole life? Everything we do is now up for sale somewhere on the Internet. And it’s not because hackers have stolen our private information. It’s because everything we register is stored in a database somewhere, and many of those databases are made available to the public. It hardly seems fair.
You and I, my friends, have been reduced to the status of information. We feed on information as well as create it.
And our hunger for information has exploded in the past few years thanks to the power of the Web.
Thanks to the advent of the Internet, much data that mankind has published online is found in too many places for the mind to manage. Highly speculative estimates say that Websites around the world consist of a million, million Web pages — and that our Internet agglomeration increases by one billion Web pages every day. Yet though online content goes away when big hosting companies close (for example, Vox and Geocities were shut down), the flood of electronic data available to us continues growing almost exponentially.
We will never be able or inclined to look at all of it. But what makes it bewildering is that these figures only look at Websites that are found in the “Indexed Web” or the “Shallow Web”. Studies suggest there exist trillions more HTML pages concealed in walled off collections named the “Dark Web” or the “Deep Web” or the “Unindexable Web”. These extensive online archives host on-site search tools and could be blocked by paid subscriptions, or they may be encapsulated in obscure structures. There are tens of thousands of proprietary search tools that let you mine the distant content of the uncrawlable Web.
Between the two Webs, which exist side-by-side, hovers half-secret public data resources. Typically denoted public records, the public information archives possess simple search tools but they have also been indexed by fee-based background records search utilities. Based on reports at a background records blog on BackgroundRecordsBlog.com, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of Internet archives of public records.
These public records include many types of state or federal records warehouses or one may find them in private collections, like business guides and directories, class or school reunion sites, and so forth. In the same way a resume hosting service exemplifies typical people resource publication. Still, a majorty of people identify public records with government archives.
When you decide to sift through public data for information about someone you may do business with, maybe to do a detailed background search, you won’t have the time and possibly you don’t have the ability to search all those databases. It is obvious how the background information search industry takes its place in growth technology. Observers from several sources put people search revenues in the billions of dollars. Discovering these huge collections of background records purchasable just on US citizens alone is typically pretty much beyond the resources of most people. Any big search engine barely scratches the mass of the huge amount of data. Plenty of research groups assess the need for and condition of records search.
Tip and tutorial guides resembling BackgroundRecordsBlog.com assist people in seeing the big picture and decide what to do. For more information in this area, you’ll also want to check out the blog at RecordsBackground.com, which is part of the RBG Information Archive.