Information that is considered public record is readily available on the internet today. That includes civil and criminal records, property ownership, current and previous addresses, vehicle registration details, relatives, schools and universities attended, and lists of neighbors.
You can also find marriage records, birth records, and divorce records. All state-issued licenses are public-record too.
While you can’t find someone’s birth certificate online, you can find the names of someone’s parents and their exact date of birth. Essentially, your mother’s maiden name is publicly accessible. People search engines can reveal email addresses, current and previous phone numbers, and approximate dates of birth.
Property records
You can find if someone has paid their taxes and the tax appraisal value of their property because real estate tax records are public information. You can technically see if someone has taken out a mortgage loan because the lender files a lien, but the company protects information about the current payment status.
Social media information
Search engines pick up almost everything you put on your social media accounts. If you post any information about employment, education, or anything else on social networks and your profiles are public, anyone can see it after googling your name.
If you pay a one-time fee or purchase a subscription to a background check service, you can learn a lot. A standard report consists of 25 pages of data on the search target on average.
Not all of this information will be reliable. If you’re looking for someone with a very common name, you might get a report on the wrong person. This is why it’s best to search by full name, including the middle name. It gets especially confusing if the person lives in a big city and there are other people in their age group with the same name in that city.
How to find everything about someone online
Short of Social Security Numbers, all information about people is up for grabs online. You can even find the SSN if you pay for it using the Dark Web. All interactions you have with the government become part of a publicly searchable record, regardless of what government levels.
Here are some ways to find everything about someone online.
If you already have some details, plug them into Google. Even a name can yield results. If you don’t know anything to definitively identify the person, don’t resort to fancy search hacks. Enter everything you know as follows: “David Montreal editor.” Keywords related to their location, job, school, and marital status will probably bring up social networks.
Establish their online presence
When you can’t link individual data points to other data points to build a person’s digital footprint, they become useless. Armed with a few details about the person, you can establish connections and fill in the blanks. You can find their LinkedIn if you know their name, city, and job. From there, you can see their education level and when they graduated from school. That will make it possible to establish their approximate age.
Use Facebook
If your Google search doesn’t reveal any social media, you might have to go to the social media themselves. The most popular medium is still Facebook, and its People Search function is robust. You can search by entering information in different search boxes: name, place of birth, high school, current city, employer, mutual friends, and college or university. Even if you know just one of these things, the People Search will narrow down the results. Then, you can browse through the list of matches to see if a photo of the person appears.
The person might have no social media presence or a private profile. In this case, try to find their relatives or friends. Your search target might be hiding behind a pseudonym on Facebook.
Background check sites to the rescue
You can use a free people search tool if you know their full name but none of their friends and relatives. The tool will show a list of relatives who you can try to track down.
You might have hit gold if you can find someone’s email, username, YouTube profile, or Twitter account. When it comes to their choice of usernames, people usually aren’t very creative. They probably used the same name on different platforms. Google their username, explore Reddit and Quora, check social networks, and look at popular blog sites for old posts or comments.
