When I’ve looked up what a people search site had on me, while loading results, the site has often said something like “Searching public records…” or “These are all public records.” If that’s the case, shouldn’t way more of these sites have information on me? I remember that when I did a manual search for myself on the sites listed on PG, only two seemed to have anything on me (I even paid them to see if they had it).
Two explanations I can think of are:
- Data brokers aren’t getting people’s information from public records. They’re buying it from various sources
- They are in public records, but as one site said, they aren’t accessible for free. One site said they charged money for their service because they’d have to pay to search the relevant databases (though strangely, they still didn’t get accurate information about me).