Who hasn’t “Goggled an ex” by now? Or found a long-lost friend on a social networking site like Face book or MySpace? Sometimes it’s hard to believe that as recently as thirty years ago; it actually took quite a bit of legwork (and expense) to find somebody. So you usually needed a damn good reason besides idle curiosity to bother looking for them.
Those good reasons haven’t changed: locating a defendant for a lawsuit, finding a witness who doesn’t want to testify about a crime, tracking down a debtor or somebody who has jumped bail, or any other number of reasons investigators are hired to find people.
A private investigator, process server, collections agent, or bounty hunter had very little technology available to them thirty years ago for locating people. They were limited to calling references and trying to find neighbors through reverse-look-up directories. Public records searches had to be done in person at local records offices. Newspaper archives could only be accessed on microfiche at local libraries. Then things got easier when computerized records databases came along in the mid-eighties. These databases contained consumer information such as telephone numbers, social security numbers, real estate records, court records, marriage records, addresses, names of relatives and others living at the same address. But they were expensive, and some “high tech” investigators created a niche industry for themselves by redistributing the information for premium fees. Today, such databases are available online from countless sources for reasonable subscription rates, and are considered basic level tools in any investigator’s resource kit. Meanwhile, free search engine technology, available to anyone, has made people-searching something of a hobby for some. How many “Yahoo! Detectives” do you know?
Most recently, Web 2.0 technologies have ushered in the rise of social networking sites, where millions of people around the world have been voluntarily giving up information on themselves. They post photos of what they currently look like, who they hang out with, their interests, hangouts, friends’ names, cities they’re living in, and companies they work for. Public records databases still remain a primary source to locate a skip, of course. After all, there are millions more people who are *not* participating in social networking online…yet. That said, it’s foolish for investigators to dismiss social media sites when engaged in a skip trace.
Where I live in the Bay Area, the hub of Web 2.0 and Internet businesses, a great many people are on the social media bandwagon. While people on social media sites may not be sharing their home addresses, they are often sharing their city, and the first and last names of their friends, providing us with still more references to search in the records databases. On top of that, they are sometimes sharing their favorite hangouts and workplaces.
