I was watching some late night tv last night and came across a commercial for beenverified.com. I've came across and heard about this site and I'm sure you have too,but I never really knew the full scope of it. So I checked the site online and was pretty surprised.
For those of you that don't know, beenverified.com is actually a free web service that connects you to a huge database so you can do background checks on basically whoever you want, provided they will be in the database. So for example, if you are hiring some random general contractor you've never used before and don't know at all but seemed like a nice guy, you can go to this site and get a background check on him and potentially see he is a sex offender who had been caught doing the diddly with girls by Chris Hansen on Dateline or something.
Obviously, this could be a great service. You can be able to see anyones rap sheet, if they have one, before you just go and blindly hire them to do work around your house and around your family.
These types of services could make society a better place, in the long run. One could argue that crime could decrease because people will recognize that if they produce a criminal record in their lifetime, they will not be able to hide it at all from anyone and take that into consideration before they start committing crimes. But, is this service overstepping some privacy boundaries?
Think about it this way. Say your a painter working your ass off to just squeeze by and you get this offer from a wealthy family to do a big job thats equivalent to 10 of your regular jobs you usually do. You show up at the house and your customer says that he cant hire you because he did a background check on you and saw you have a criminal record because you got into a bar fight when you were 21 and were charged with assault and battery. Now your completely shit out of luck and just lost a huge moneymaking job.
Beenverified is not the only site around either. There's sites like socialintelligence.com, snoopstationn, and angieslist that basically do the same thing and have different databases. This exposure is not just limited to background checks either. We all know the site carfax that tells all about a person's used car and every little fender-bender it has been in.
So what do you guys think? Are these services good for people and society as a whole? Or is business overstepping its boundaries and invading our privacy with all of this delicate and telling information?
NOTE: Did a google images search on beenverified.com for a pictureto put on this post and Antoine Dodson (the "Hid yo kids, Hid yo wife, they're rapin everybody" youtube sensation for those of you that don't know) came up as one of the top results. He's now the face of a sex offender tracker app for cell phones....
