Prying eyes

Later this year, Idaho officials will launch a one-stop court Web site that lets people track judgments, traffic citations, court appearances, divorces and verdicts statewide. It will join Washington and dozens of other states already offering that clearinghouse of personal records.

The Idaho site takes another step toward making public information easier than ever to find. Once only available to law enforcement officers or approved regulatory organizations, piles of personal information now have become easily accessible to online snoops.

University of Washington communications professor Philip Howard says we’ve entered the age of “little brother” as opposed to the Big Brother concerns of earlier decades.

“People think the big source of surveillance is the government or other large institutions. But it’s the case that now you can get more information due to many different Web sites all over the place that gather available public information and give it to anyone quickly,” Howard said.

Those are sites such as Zillow.com, a Seattle realty database that shows home values, property history and other snapshots about one’s home address. Another is OpenSecrets.org, which slices, dices and provides information on campaign contributions made by your boss, relatives or co-workers. The site shows amounts given and to which candidate, listing the year of contribution.

Those examples simply use already available public information and gather it and aggregate it in a simpler way, Howard said.

He and others tracking the growth of databases believe the government has done a good job of insuring that sensitive public information does not find its way online. Still off-limits are credit card histories, banking information, medical records, driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers and sensitive court rulings such as protective orders and adoptions.

Some records, such as credit reports, are available in limited instances, such as when an employer is conducting a background check on a possible hire.

Despite advertised claims by many Net pay-for-search firms that they find anything about anyone, most paid Web searches produce a limited range of information, said Dave Koch, employment screening product manager for Spokane-based ACRAnet, a commercial background screening service.

“The online retail marketers likely have the same public data but charge an arm and leg for their reports and really promise no due diligence to determine if the requester has a permissible purpose or that the information is accurate,” said Koch, adding that ACRAnet and most professional background checkers don’t rely on the Web for valid information. “You just can’t be sure what you’re getting on the Web is accurate.”

But around the world, people have developed personal profiles of people they are considering hiring, dating or firing.

Mark Eamer, director of business development at Zillow, paid $30 last year to a Web search firm for an individual background check on a possible nanny. The company went through a 30-minute online search of criminal records and found just one Texas traffic offense. That was the same offense the nanny had disclosed when telling Eamer her record was nearly spotless.

“It gave me peace of mind,” Eamer said of the report. “It showed where she had lived before and the one speeding charge. I could have found all that if I wanted to track down the county in Texas and make all that effort. But this was quicker and was worth saving my time.”

While public records continue moving to the Web, the online world continues collecting millions of digital footprints left by Internet users who unwittingly, or intentionally, provide personal details of their lives, their health and finances and even their shopping lists online.

Much of what people reveal about themselves online has vast benefits for e-commerce and social interaction, said Seattle consultant Linda Criddle, who writes about online safety and best practices for online security.

But the tendency to expand what we disclose online also allows identity thieves and predators to find victims far more easily than before, Criddle said.

Criddle, whose recent book “Look Both Ways,” describes how to limit one’s online exposure, said people gradually have become too comfortable handing out telling details about their lives.

They create book wish lists on Amazon.com. They post resumes across the Web, and those resumes list hobbies, past employers, past addresses and professional associations they belong to.

People unleash highly personal discussions on blogs. On travel sites, they reveal they plan to take a six-month trip to Africa. Or they post family photos of themselves and children, sometimes including home addresses or other revealing information, Criddle said.

While younger Web users often leave gobs of personal information on network sites like Facebook.com or MySpace, the problem is not confined to 20-somethings, Criddle added.

“Adults are nearly as likely as youth to expose their name, address, phone number, and other identifying, or emotionally vulnerable, information. They may do it in different ways like through a corporate bio, or they may be exposing it like youth through dating sites, genealogy sites or personal blogs,” Criddle said.

The rise of blog culture has made its way into professional background checking, said Larry Lambeth, president of Spokane-based Employment Screening Services, Inc.

His firm does thousands of personal background checks for major companies looking at hiring people from across the country. Lambeth said many employers also want him to search across the Web and see what an applicant might have said on a blog.

“We don’t do that, and we tell them they can do that on their own. But we don’t want to go in that direction,” Lambeth said.

Like millions of people, Lambeth has done his share of vanity-Googling, the practice of popping his name into the popular Web search engine Google.

The results are a mixed bag and confirm his opinion that the Web provides loads of information, and much of it can be misleading, wrong or useless.

His drive-by Googling of “Larry Lambeth” finds 10 pages of results, many of them referring to someone who launched a Segway motorized scooter business, a B-movie actor, a Greenpeace activist, a business owner in Spokane, a deceased preacher, a frequent letter writer who has a passionate dislike for Wal-Mart, and a race car driver in the South.

All but two of them have nothing to do with him, Lambeth said, laughing.

One of the other Web twins even has his same middle initial. “So, there someone else out there with my exact same name,” he said.

People who discover they are easily tracked online don’t have to throw up their arms in despair, Criddle said.

They can take active steps to opt out of many of the commonly used Web search services. Among those that give people the opt-out option are Zabasoft.com, 555-1212.com and Intelius.com, a Seattle-based information retrieval company.

Criddle feels online transparency and access to accurate personal information are both important for commerce and effective government. But consumers and taxpayers need to demand that Web site administrators protect personal data better, and warn them when they introduce services or features that open the door to further invasive snooping, she said.