Pine Pienaar | Managing Director | Afiswitch | mail me |
Have you ever done a Google search on yourself? Most people have and if your friends and family are active online and on social media platforms, someone at some stage has probably recommended to you that you do such a search and check.
It is actually a good practice, as it gives you some insight into what information about you may be publicly available. Whether its photos from your latest holiday, the restaurant you checked into with family and friends over the weekend, your place of employment or professional networking sites.
Prime custodians of information
Fortunately, you can still decide if you are comfortable that any such information about you is available for anyone connected to the internet to view – and if not, change the privacy settings on all your social media profiles.
But who else has access to background information about you, and why?
Two potential prime custodians of information about you are your employer and any creditor you may have a loan or account with.
For example, when you apply for a new job or a large loan, the hiring organisation or financial institution respectively will often require you to complete an application form with a series of personal questions, for their respective background screening purposes.
While some of the information each will require will differ, generally it will certainly include information such as your full name details, your identification number, where you live, etc. – and often you will be asked to provide proof of these details, such as a copy of your identification document and possibly proof of residence.
By providing such information you are giving the hiring organisation or financial institution permission to view and ‘hold onto’ such information about you.
Additionally, and given the growing phenomenon of fake documents and identity fraud, many hiring organisations and financial institutions are taking this a step further, as capturing and storing biometrics as proof of identification is becoming increasingly commonplace, especially in the digital age we live in today.
For this, the hiring organisation or financial intuition will ask you to share some form of biometric – a digital scan of your fingerprint is most commonly used – and will then request your permission to use your biometric to conduct a background check on you.
Background checks
The purpose of the background check is foremost to confirm your identity, but it may also include if you have a previous conviction, qualification verifications and your employment and/or credit history.
In most instances this process is merely a formality where using a biometric produces results with higher accuracy than relying solely on an identification number or document. And, if you’ve been completely honest on all the information about yourself that you shared in the application process – what do you have to hide?
Well, what if you don’t know that, for example, you have a previous conviction or pending case awaiting trial against you? Or perhaps you are not aware of the fact that your name and/or identification number has previously been listed as a bad creditor?
In our experience, and particularly with previous or pending convictions, many people are unaware that they have a conviction or case awaiting trial against them. This could be for any number of reasons, for example; unpaid fines for traffic offenses that have been escalated, to something a person may have done when they were younger for which at the time they signed an ‘admission of guilt’ and paid a fine, not realising this would reflect on their record.
In either instance mentioned here the person may be unaware because they have not yet, or at all, received written feedback or documentation pertaining to the confirmed or pending conviction. Similarly, a person’s details may have been entered onto a ‘bad creditor’ database, or their accounts handed over for legal collection of which they may not be aware due to a gap in communications, for example.
Recommendation
To remedy this, we recommend that individuals conduct various self-checks on themselves on a regular basis – to ensure that the information available about them is correct and up-to-date at all times.
This ensures that the hiring organisation or financial institution which an individual may be applying to, for example, can rest assured that they know who they are dealing with – and in turn the individual knows themselves and what information they are sharing in a technological driven information sharing society.
