My geek joy for the day - Using public records for on the fly identity check

Those of you who know me already understand my record keeping paradox. At the office I am freak for record keeping. Truth is it almost borders on a nazi-esk insanity. However, at home I am much more.. well.. lax. Somewhere in my garage is an unmarked folder in an unmarked box that contains my birth certificate, a spare driver’s license, and my social security card. The problem is that I can not find these things and, I am hoping, that at some point here I will get a job and need to use such papers to prove my identity.

To this end I decided to get a copy of my birth certificate (At a cost of $50.00 BTW) so I can get a copy of my social security card (Which also requires I get a copy of my drivers license since I need to have one in my pocket and send one to the SS office, who insists on having an original mailed to them.) But this is all mundane personal life bookkeeping that no one, not even me, finds particularly interesting. So why am I blogging? Well at check out the service state uses to provide copies of your birth certificate, VitalChek, asked my four interesting questions.

In addition to the standard, what is your name, birthdates, social security number, father’s full name, mothers full maiden name, place you were born, etc. I received four security questions that were rather interesting.

• Which of the following cities have you PREVIOUSLY OR CURRENTLY used as your address?
• In what county do you currently live?
• Which of the following people have resided with you or used the same address as you?
• Which of the following streets have you PREVIOUSLY OR CURRENTLY used as your address?

Supposedly the questions are random and each has a dropdown box for multiple choice answers. The last one actually had two correct answers from two different states in the pool. My initial reaction was “Wow that is cool!” and then it went to “This is all public record information that is not difficult to obtain.” Which lead me back to my first reaction as I realized that this service takes the information you entered, name, birthdate, shipping address, etc. and pulls the “security” information from other public databases on the net. Being a data freak who believes in the liberal use of public API’s and automation I thought that was way fun and easily represented several weeks of work to find the systems with the info, figure out their api’s and then hunt down the information, and generate questions and answers from that information on the fly! Then again, they could also just take a part of my $15 fee and subscribe to a central information clearing hose, but that is not nearly as much fun.

For a bit of a thrill check out
http://govsearchrecords.com/
http://www.searchsystems.net/
https://www.knowx.com/