Doing a public data search doesn’t always have to be a difficult process. The internet has made information a lot easier to access, and all you need is a little know-how. People from all walks of life do public data searches every single day for all sorts of reasons, and not all of them know the most efficient way to go about it. Doing this kind of search the easy way can save you hours upon hours, as well as a lot of boring busywork that goes into collecting this kind of information.
What’s the Deal With Public Data Searches?
If you’ve never done a public data search, there may be a little confusion as to what it is, why someone would do it, and what kind of information you can expect to get from it. It’s all entirely understandable because the title on its own doesn’t exactly give you all of the information you need to fully understand what this process entails.
Even the simplest of tasks can be a bit confusing if you’re looking at just the name of it alone, especially when you’re dealing with vague titles. If you didn’t know exactly what we were talking about, something as simple as straining pasta could be a confusing task. After all, what kind of pasta are we straining? What is the end result here? Similar questions apply to public data searches. What kind of data are we looking for, and why?
Luckily enough, the answer is just as simple as it is complicated because it does really depend on what you’re looking for. There are a lot of things that fall under the umbrella of public data. Business records for publicly traded companies, court records, property information, assets of congresspeople, the list goes on. There is a significant amount of data that is considered to be public, and as an American, it’s your right to access all of it. Fortunately enough, it can be easy to find most of this information.
Now to answer the “why” of it all. This one is a little more tricky because it depends not only on the data you’re looking for but also on the person looking for it and their particular intentions. Some people want to find this information simply out of curiosity. Maybe they just want to find out if their neighbor pays more or less property taxes than they do. Some people do it for valuable research, like looking at a publicly traded company’s business records to decide if they want to purchase stocks for that company.
Sometimes it’s even about safety. You can easily find things like sex offender registries that have all sorts of information about sex offenders in your area, meaning that you can get a better idea of who in your community may pose a threat to the safety of yourself or your children. You can also easily find things like driving records, which many people also use as a safety thing. Really, the reason for finding this information heavily depends on the person looking into it.
What is Public Data and Why is it Important?
Public data is a very intriguing legal phenomenon. Legally, it is defined as anything in any form that the government has deemed declassified. There are a lot of things that fall under this designation, including things like video recordings, audio recordings, physical documents, computer files, and really anything you can think of. This information is available to the public in an effort to make the government more transparent for its citizens, and it does a good job at that. Anyone can access a treasure trove of public data at any time for any reason through the internet.
You see, everything that you do that interacts with the government is recorded. Everything that the government does, in general, is recorded, and that information can either be deemed classified or declassified. Declassified information is also public data, and that’s why this information is available in the first place. Of course, there are still some things that are classified that the public can’t access, but the government usually has good reasons for that.
Every state is allowed to make up its own public data laws, so you can see a lot of different laws on the books all over the country. Some states prefer to be as transparent as possible, while others are a lot more secretive about their doings, but every state has some level of transparency.
Finding Public Data: A Major Inconvenience or a Walk in the Park?
When embarking on any mission for information, most people want to know how difficult it is. Information gathering has been something humans have done for thousands of years, and it always varies in difficulty. Sometimes it’s as easy as asking a question, like “where did you get this delicious piece of fruit?” and other times it requires a team of expertly trained spies to go deep undercover to recover as much intel from the opposition as possible. There are levels of difficulty in obtaining information between the two that we just listed.
But where exactly does a public data search fall? The short answer is that it depends on what you’re looking for. You can find things like business records by simply googling the name of the business and their records, and you can find it on the companies own website. This is required by the SEC, or Securities Exchange Commission, for publicly traded companies to make sure that any and all investors are able to get information about companies they’re buying into.
Something else that’s incredibly easy to access is property records. You usually just have to go to the county website for the property in question and poke around a little bit, and you’ll be able to find all the information you’re looking for in minutes. This is commonly used by people looking to buy houses, either to live in or to turn into rental properties. This information allows people to find out exactly how much a property is worth and what the property taxes are. People that are looking into investing in rental properties actually use these records to do calculations to find out if the rent would cover both the mortgage for the home and the taxes on the property.
If you’re looking for things like arrest records or warrant information, it’s a 50/50 if you’ll find it, unless you know the right place to look. Many county law enforcement agencies do provide this kind of information right on their website in an easy-to-use database that anyone can access, but this isn’t required, so not every county does. It’s also worth mentioning that some counties don’t do a great job with these databases, so you could run into missing information or even outdated information, which isn’t great for your search.
If you’re looking for these kinds of records, all you really need to do is turn to a personal background check service. Personal background check services are specially equipped to handle these kinds of searches and can pull up all sorts of information that you would have had an exceedingly difficult time getting otherwise. Most people that do these kinds of searches routinely use a personal background check service at least some of the time because it’s hard to match the level of convenience that it brings to its users.
These services operate very precisely and are able to pull up a lot of very accurate information very quickly, which makes them ideal for anyone trying to do a personal background check kind of public data search. Their systems are able to pull information from public data databases all over the country, some of which are more than a little difficult to locate on your own. Once it has all of the relevant information, it provides you with detailed search results all on one, easy-to-read page. The best part about the entire process? After you enter all of the required information, it can give you your search results instantly without any fuss, assuming you don’t happen to run into internet issues at the exact moment you decide to do this search.
Spend Less Time Searching and More Time Relaxing
Time is an incredibly valuable asset and is a non-renewable resource. With that in mind, finding ways to make common tasks like public data searches take less time can help you spend more of your time doing the things you love and less time slaving away in front of a computer trying to locate the information. Whether you’re a single parent just trying to make the time you have with your children last or you’re a single person that wants to make sure that your tinder date isn’t a dangerous criminal, you can rest a little easier knowing that the information you need is just a few clicks away.
***SpyFly provides consumers affordable, immediate access to public record information. Federal laws prohibit businesses from using SpyFly’s service to make decisions about employment, insurance, consumer credit, tenant screening, or for any other purpose subject to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, 15 USC 1681 et seq.**