Monday, December 29, 2008

The Curse of the Intelius

I just discovered Intelius today which in itself is an almost-funny-if-it-weren't-quite-so-creepy story, the essence of which is that I was checking to see if there was public record of a certain someone having died.  If this person has died, then this person has successfully kept this person's passing a secret from every Internet-based public record mechanism.  Keeping one's death under the radar would be a spectacular feat to accomplish posthumously, therefore I can only conclude that this person lives on, albeit with greater ignominy for having failed to maintain contact with yours truly.  The point is that I was directed to Intelius through a series of searches whereupon I, most reasonably, chose myself as a test subject and entered my own name in the available fields.  

What I found is that there are three Jennifer Sassers in California, myself being one of them.  Not content with acknowledging my existence, it also lists my relatives, by name, and if you click upon the "more information" button as I did, you will find that you can order reports detailing, among other less interesting factoids, my personal history of lawsuits, sex offender status, small claims filings, address history, and criminal history all for the spectacularly low price of $49.95.  For less that 50 bones, you too can violate my privacy.  So perhaps you see why I've entitled this post as I have, although I was a bit conflicted about using the word "curse."  It's not like they've wished a pox upon me (however, in my experience proclaiming a pox upon people is wildly ineffective), but nonetheless I am experiencing a bit of leery anxiety.  As a matter of fact, I actually get chills when I think about it too much... then I realize it's probably just from the shadow Big Brother casts while he looks over my shoulder.

No comments: