JARDIN: Launched in February, ZabaSearch emerged during a period of heightened sensitivity about identity theft.
MATZORKIS: ZabaSearch provides people at least some sense of what information is available out there about them. He asserts that the service actually helps the people listed there. JARDIN: ZabaSearch's Matzorkis argues the company is just democratizing access to data that's already available to people in business and government. Professor DANIEL SOLOVE (George Washington University Author, "The Digital Person"): We have information that's out there that is being used in ways that cause severe problems to a lot of individuals a kind of pollution of sorts, a kind of exploitation of sorts, with very little to regulate or control what the companies do with it. George Washington University law Professor Daniel Solove is author of "The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age." That angers critics who accuse ZabaSearch of exploiting the lack of privacy protections in America. The company also plans to sell ads and other services. ZabaSearch charges for detail, like background checks, and criminal history reports. Other companies sell much more sensitive information than ZabaSearch offers, including aliases, bankruptcy records and tax liens, but those services at a significant price tag that tends to discourage casual impulse snoopers.
#ZABASEARCH FREE#
Yahoo!'s free people search, for example, returns names, phone numbers and addresses, but only ones already in the public phone books. ZabaSearch is hardly the only service of its kind. JARDIN: And there's no shortage of prospective buyers. The reality is that the toothpaste is out of the tube. When you apply for a credit card-the information industry in the United States is a multibillion-dollar industry. NICK MATZORKIS (Chairman, ZabaSearch): When you move and you fill out a change of address form at the post office, the post office gathers all that data and sells it off to information brokers. He says all this information comes from the public domain. But ZabaSearch Chairman Nick Matzorkis doesn't understand the alarm.
JARDIN: The free information can even include birth month and year, unlisted phone numbers and satellite photos of your house. BONNER: I saw lots of places I had lived in the past, phone numbers I used to have, from as recently as last year to as long ago as 10 years ago. BONNER: I was pretty surprised at all the stuff that came up. JARDIN: As blogger and art gallery owner Sean Bonner of Los Angeles discovered when he searched for his own name, a free query on the site returns a lot of data, some of it inaccurate, that can go back for several years. SEAN BONNER (Los Angeles Art Gallery Owner): It was pretty creepy.
If ZabaSearch has all that stuff on them, what do you suppose it has on you? And what about the idea of privacy? Here's DAY TO DAY technology contributor Xeni Jardin.Ī search for personal data on tends to generate one of two reactions: curiosity or panic. A new online search engine can find all sorts of interesting data about people you are interested in, including unlisted phone numbers, birthdays, the addresses of places where they've lived, even satellite pictures of where they're living now. Coming up, new restrictions on who can be a sperm donor.įirst, this: New technology and the World Wide Web.
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