Commentary: People Finders: You can run but you can't hide

Daily Record and the Kansas City Daily News-Press, Apr 13, 2005 by Evelyn M. Campbell

Choicepoint - www.choicepointonline.com - is the company that has been in the headlines lately because of theft of information on about 145,000 U.S. citizens in its database. It is headquartered outside Atlanta and provides Internet access to more than 14 billion current and historical records on individuals and businesses. Searching can be done with as little information as a name or a social security number in a number of different reports. Pricing for the reports varies. This service provides a detailed and comprehensive report with information from three credit header sources. Civil and criminal court searches also can be done on individuals.

AutoTrackXP - www.autotrackxp. com - is another people finder resource which is now owned by Choicepoint. AutoTrackXP cross- references an enormous amount of data - addresses, driver's licenses, property deed transfers - and puts the data into a single easy-to-read report. It can even access real-time telephone listings and can perform on-demand court searches. Pricing is similar to ChoicePoint online searches.

Do not overlook the two big online service providers - LexisNexis and Westlaw, when looking for information on people. On LexisNexis information on individuals is located under Public Records Sources. There is a very useful feature called SmartLinx which brings together in one report all the people-finder sources in LexisNexis and also provides links to the original documents from which the information was obtained. If less comprehensive information is needed, look under any one of the public records resources which include P-Find, P-Seek, P-Search and P-Trak. These resources are combined under Allfind and EZfind. In order to use Allfind you have to have permissible use under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. www.lexis.com

Westlaw's people finder information is in its Public Records database under People Finder and includes death records, name and address tracker, name tracker, skip tracer, social security number tracker, telephone tracker and obituary pages. westlaw.com

This survey of sources is by no means a comprehensive and complete list of the people-finder resources available, but this overview should serve as a starting point from which to launch a search for particular persons.

Evelyn M. Campbell is the librarian at Hunton & Williams in Richmond, Virginia. An earlier version of this article first appeared in the Spring 2003 issue of the Virginia Association of Law Libraries Newsletter.