The FCRA, and why we’re not a screening service

There is one legal line that matters more than any other in the world of people-search, and it is drawn by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The FCRA is a federal law that governs “consumer reports” — information used to make decisions about a person’s eligibility for employment, housing, credit, insurance, and a handful of similar consequential matters. When information is used for those purposes, a dense set of legal protections attaches: the subject’s consent, strict accuracy standards, the right to dispute errors, and adverse-action notices when a report costs someone a job or an apartment. Those protections exist for good reason, and they are not optional.

We are deliberately and explicitly not a consumer reporting agency, and our service may not be used for any FCRA-covered purpose. That is not a disclaimer we bury in a footer; it is a defining constraint on what this product is for. You may not use our information to decide whether to hire someone, rent to someone, extend credit to someone, insure someone, or make any similar eligibility decision about another person’s life. If that is what you need, you need a properly regulated screening company that provides FCRA-compliant consumer reports with all the attendant protections for the person being screened.

The reason we draw the line so firmly cuts both ways — it protects the people in our records and it protects you. It protects the subjects of searches because FCRA-covered decisions carry life-altering stakes, and the law rightly demands accuracy, consent, and recourse before information is allowed to shape them. Our data, drawn from aggregated public records, is not built or verified to that standard; using it to deny someone a job would expose them to consequences the law specifically forbids. And it protects you, the user, because using non-FCRA-compliant information to make a covered decision can itself create serious legal liability. The prohibition is a shield, not merely a rule.

So what is the service legitimately for? Reconnection and personal knowledge: finding lost family, old friends, classmates, and service connections; confirming that a new acquaintance is who they say they are before you meet them; understanding your own public footprint. These personal, non-eligibility uses are exactly what public-records search has always supported, and they are the entirety of what we are built for. The dividing question is simple and worth memorizing: am I about to use this information to grant or deny someone an opportunity — a job, a home, a loan, a policy? If yes, stop; you are outside permitted use. If no, you are almost certainly fine.

A few related boundaries follow from the same spirit and deserve stating plainly. Do not use the service to harass, stalk, intimidate, or threaten anyone; reconnection is consensual by nature, and a person’s right to decline contact is absolute. Honor opt-outs and removal requests as legitimate exercises of a person’s control over their own information, not obstacles. And when in genuine doubt about whether a use is permitted, treat the doubt itself as your answer and don’t proceed. These constraints are what make it possible to offer this kind of tool responsibly, and holding to them is a condition of using it at all.