Instant Checkmate: Pros and Cons

Instant Checkmate is an online service that provides people finder, criminal history and other public record information to individuals on a subscription basis or for a one-time fee. This is an emerging service which provides detailed important information about anyone. These data includes phone numbers, addresses, demographics, census data, arrest records, and more. All these data that is acquired by this service and made available to anyone with a paid subscription is considered to be a part of “public records”. This service acquires these massive amounts of data from public sources whether it is a state and local government or social networking sites. This service comprises data from variety of such sources and makes it available in the report form for anyone to view as long as they paid for the service.

I can understand the use for such a system. However, after looking at this site and reading reviews about it, I have become more concern as to what this site is actually offering should be allowed? The site list the types of records that are consider public such as census records, criminal records, voter registration, birth records, residential addresses, and more. I understand that this service is basically utilizing the power of computing to bring everything public about a person in a one and central place for anyone to view; however, it also brings out many issues to consider. Providing public information in one-place is certainly not illegal. They have the freedom to do such thing. What worries me is that should they have freedom to do so? I am not objecting to the idea of making what is public information available to public. I am merely suggesting that the ways of doing so should be more restrictive. For example, consider what is one accomplishing using this service? Why does this service matter? One might argue that it provides a means to perform some sort of background check on an individual stranger before it’s too late. One might also add that through these reports, one can learn much crucial information about someone they might otherwise wouldn’t necessary have known. This allows one to be more thorough.

On the other hand, the opposite is also possible. A bad person or a criminal is also able to find their target through the use of this site. This site would provide criminals enough information to conduct their malicious activities on such and such person. You might be wondering, so what is the difference between this site and other social networking sites, white pages, etc? They all include this information in them and they can be viewed by anyone. Well, for social networking sites, the user choose what and who do they want to share certain information with. Also, these sites do not require them to provide their phone numbers, addresses, and other personally identifiable information. Should the user choose to, it is up to them, but they are not required to do so. Moreover, public information is of course available to public when needed, however, it takes time to get access. One needs to go through many different sources to acquire different types of public information necessary since they are stored in different places. Since, one has to gather the information from many sources, one might not be as motivated to go through such lengths unless it is absolutely worth it. Whereas in Instant Checkmate, all of these personally identifiable information is provided in one report about that person. The site clearly does not care who uses that information as long as they get paid for it.