Do you ever give much thought to your personal information? We’re talking about the data that is freely available within the pubic domain, which is specifically linked to you as a person. Do you ever think about who could access it, and what they could use it for?
Of course, information available freely within the public domain is not anything hugely personally damaging, e.g. nobody can find out about your bank details, and use it for self-gain, but they can find out where your last known address is, they can find out your date of birth, your employment status (in some cases), and they can find out about your martial history, including any divorces which have been completed. Whilst some people don’t care about this type of information, others do.
Which camp do you fall into?
Protection When You Need it The Most
The good news is that there is local and worldwide legislation that protects our sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands completely. Let’s talk about your employer for instance, they are not allowed to hold personal records on you and your work history for longer than a set amount of time. After this, such information much be destroyed in a sensitive manner, to ensure that it doesn’t go missing, and cannot be accessed by anyone other than those who require to see it for their job purposes.
This should go some way to reassuring you that although certain information is available for anyone to view, the real nitty gritty stuff is protected. reporting unethical behavior results in termination
On the plus side, whilst anyone can access your personal information (for a fee, of course), you can also do the same. If you want to reconnect with an old friend or relative, you can pay the fee to access public records, and you can find out their last known address, as well as a few other useful bits of information, to help you with your search.
Reversing Your Search
There are also other useful search tools on offer, such as reverse phone lookup. If you have the phone number of someone, or of a company, and you want to find out more information, e.g. who the number really belongs to (if it’s a cold caller), or the address, you can easily access that data by using this search facility.
Whilst it might worry you that anyone can find out where you live, you have to see the upside of it – you are still protected, and there are laws to stop your really personal data becoming public knowledge. You can also make use of such searches to find out what you need to find out on someone else too. Whilst we can’t stop hackers and cyber attacks from potentially compromising our identities, there is a lot of work being done behind the scenes to try and minimise such effects. In the meantime, we are as safe as we can possibly be from a personal information and identity point of view.