Getting the Gist of Public Records

Public records are the information that were recorded or filed by state, local, federal and other agencies of the government like property and corporate records. The local and federal government created public records – immigration, driving records, vital records, criminal records, etc. Majority of the important vital records are kept by the government and some are readily available for the public either with a fee or is given free. The availability of a specified document will be determined by the state, local and federal regulations.

Records for public viewing are made on physical files. Many of which are available through other sources or just by going to the Internet. It doesn’t necessarily mean that because public documents have a nature to be in “public”, accessibility is not that simple and not totally free. California, there are places wherein policies are separated governing any availability of such information provided to the public. According to law, any kind of personal information cannot be divulged to another person without consent.

Some businesses that offer access to certain databases are known to specialize in a specific topic although there are only few that attempts to offer all kinds of resources that tackles academic, risk management, legal professionals, government, accounting, and even law enforcements. Companies that give out unscrupulous software with promises of unlimited public record access although, it would turn out that it can provide no more than information on how to generally access free public document websites.

In the United States, access to any kind of public document is guided by FOIA (Freedom of Information Act). For every state, there are separate versions of FOIA. The degrees of accessibility may vary from one state to another in terms of how easy or difficult it would be to request documents or receive data.

A controversy now arises with the knowledge that is easily brought up because of Internet access. There is a dramatic increase in number of those who wishes to view public records which are readily available in different public record website either with or without fee. Parties such as information broker can make use of public documents in order to effectively compile files on millions of citizens worldwide which can be easily accessed by just clicking a button.

They make profit on the opportunity from mining and re-compiling data. There are also sensitive and private information that are available for everyone to see namely information on financial transactions, cases on divorces, and insurance lawsuits.

Employers take advantage of the offer the Internet readily has to be able to proceed with background checks on employees through information given out by agencies and because of free access, sometimes private and embarrassing data are revealed that can be the reason for the employer find more disadvantages than advantages just by looking at the employee’s past records which are not really necessary.

This kind of transparency is objected by the government which is becoming an issue on the part of the people who were taken advantage of because of unwanted profile search. The government made sure that whoever is responsible for divulging any kind of information that is not warranted must be held accountable. However, it has been a complicated operation because of how the trend of technology is happening in the current age of information.