Americans, whether they realize it or not, leave a trail of data with every life step. As soon as a person is married or divorced, basic details about the event goes on file at the local courthouse for anybody to browse. The same can be said for anyone who has registered to vote, acquired a professional license, bought a piece of real estate, filed for bankruptcy, been convicted of a crime or simply moved and listed a new address and phone number.
And those are just the public records. Other information -- like driving records, credit histories and Social Security numbers -- is available to companies and individuals under certain legal guidelines, for example, in cases when a person consents to a search of his past.
"There is a whole body of information out there in public records that people are generally not aware of," said James Lee, a spokesman for ChoicePoint, a company based near Atlanta that compiles and searches public records.
Before the dawn of the Web, most of this personal information remained out of the spotlight. Because records were stored in the offices of individual companies and courts, often in backroom file cabinets or offline computer systems, they were difficult and costly to search. The shift to digital storage has meant that many of those records are now widely available.
Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the demand for such information has increased -- and the inquiries are coming not only from law enforcement agencies. Organizations that conduct background checks report a surge in requests over the past two months from companies that want to screen job applicants and employees. More employers are discovering that they can now tap into a new generation of databases that integrate public and some private records, making the search process easier and less expensive than ever.
"Background checks used to be a luxury; now they are a necessity," said Christopher Ballas, general manager of Backgrounds Online, a company that uses databases of public and private records to retrieve information for employers and other institutions. He said that the company had seen a 33 percent increase in business in the past month from employers who are re-evaluating security.
"They see how easy it was for hijackers to get through and onto the airlines," he said. "So now they are asking themselves, Who is in our business? Who is handling our books?"
Officials in human resources departments also report that they are conducting more background checks. In a survey conducted on Sept. 18 by the Society for Human Resource Management, a membership organization, respondents answered questions about how the workplace had been affected by the attacks. Nearly one-quarter identified "the screening of employees for hiring" as one of the most significant changes.
Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a watchdog group in San Diego, said that within a day after the attacks she began receiving calls from employers who wanted to know how to look into their employees' histories while still complying with privacy laws. (The answer, in most cases, was that they must at least get permission from the employees first.)
The leap in demand, several screening companies say, is coming from employers of all kinds -- whether they hire airline workers, truck drivers, accountants or hotel managers. The companies would not name specific clients, although Lee at ChoicePoint said that "40 percent are Fortune 100 clients." Some employers have even decided to run checks on people who have worked for them for years.
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