By SCOTT DEWING
Published: July 2005

I’M SEARCHING FOR MYSELF. I know where I am, of course. I’m seated right here in front of my computer. What I’m searching for is my digital self: a bundle of bits and bytes somewhere out in cyberspace. I know I’m out there—a name, a number, a birth date, a satellite image—all to be found by anyone who cares to look for me. The digital you is out there too.

I’m searching for myself and I’m finding a lot of information, enough that I could probably fake my own identity. Okay, I’m not sure if you can actually do that and get away with it. If, however, you wanted to fake someone else’s identity or track them down or engage in some malicious cyber-harassment, the Internet has become a great resource for gathering the necessary information to do so.

There’s a growing wealth of personal information about each and everyone of us becoming increasingly available via the World Wide Web. Through a combination of free and fee-based database searches, you can create a “digital dossier” of just about anyone in pretty short order.

So far, I’ve gathered and filled my own digital dossier with the following: full name, date of birth, social security number, spouse’s name, date of birth and social security number, mother and father’s names, social security numbers and dates of birth, current and previous address of residence, property and home ownership, credit report, and criminal background report.

Most of the information I found about myself was quite accurate. I was surprised, however, to discover that I had violated ORS 811210 (failure to use a seat belt) in Yamhill County in July 2002. I wasn’t in Yamhill County in July 2002. The middle name on the “offender name” of the report was my brother’s. The first name was mine. My brother’s middle initial is S. Either the police officer mistyped something into the computer or my brother has some explaining to do as to how my name ended up associated with said infraction.

My quest to find myself started at zabasearch.com, which claims to be, “The #1 Free People Search and Public Information Search Engine.” Zabasearch has a very simple search interface with a “Search a Name” field and a “State” drop-down menu. Type in a name, select a state, click the Search button and you’re on your way to finding people.

According to the Zabasearch website, “zaba” is from the Greek word tzaba, which means “free” or “at no cost”. Well, turns out that its not all “free”. If you really want to dig up dirt and get the goods on people, you need to pay. I sprung for the $20 “background check”, which provided me with a listing of current and previous addresses, relative’s and neighbor’s addresses, as well as property ownership records and a criminal record check.

Much of the information available via zabasearch.com and other personal information trafficking sites come from public records: state records, county records, court records and the like. When you buy a house, your ownership becomes public record. If you get a ticket for not wearing your seatbelt that becomes a public record too. And because those records are public they can be made available to the public, retrievable by anyone via websites like zabasearch.com.

According to Zabasearch, “[It] simply serves as a search engine in locating available public records and does not create the records found. Information typically makes it to the public domain via a wide variety of sources, including but not limited to: phone listings, court records, real property records, subscriptions etc. Sources vary state by state and region by region. Unlike Zabasearch, there are many companies who do gather, generate, compile, house and sell public information, most of which are publicly traded. This practice is, and always has been, legal in the United States and is the basis for the 2 billion dollar U.S. information industry.”

I know, I felt that chill run down my spine too. Isn’t all of this divulging of personal information tantamount to an invasion of privacy? Surely this can’t be legal? Well, it’s not an invasion of privacy and it is quite legal. All the information available via Zabasearch and other rival sites has been available for many years—but as paper-based records that required some specialized knowledge and effort to acquire. With the rise of electronic records and the interconnectedness of the Internet, however, those records are now easily distributed and gathered. With a couple mouse clicks all of that disparate data can be brought together into what Daniel J. Solove of The George Washington University Law School has referred to as a “digital dossier”.

“Unfortunately, our federal and state constitutions provide us with little guidance when it comes to digital dossiers and sites like Zabasearch,” wrote Anita Ramasastry, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Washington, in a recent article for findlaw.com, “The contemporary erosion of our privacy was unimaginable two hundred years ago.”

In his recent book, The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age, Solove writes, “The privacy problem created by the use of databases stems from an often careless and unconcerned bureaucratic process, one that has little judgment or accountability…. We are not just heading toward a world of Big Brother, but to a world that is beginning to resemble Kafka’s vision in The Trial.”

Solove paints a somewhat dark and dystopian future. But as our lives become more digital and interconnected, lived and recorded online, our challenge will be to stare down the barrel of that darkness, imagine the unimaginable, and make difficult decisions about the changing future of privacy in the digital age.