There are a mind-boggling number of starting points, on the internet, for conducting company research. Most of the indepth stuff costs money. This site compiles links to directories, divided by topic and country.

As the wealth of online information grows, private investigation websites are becoming more powerful and popular. Their client lists include attorneys, insurance agencies, banks, neighbors, employers, and, oh yes, stalkers and identity thieves. When a stalker used information from a web investigator to track down and kill his victim, the New Hampshire Supreme Court held the investigator liable for its customer’s criminal acts. This iBrief considers how far liability should extend for a web investigator, distinguishes web investigators from handgun and bullet retailers, and explains how this decision realizes a policy against privacy invasions.

Congress enacted the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (“Sarbanes-Oxley”) to protect investors by combating corporate crime and improving corporate governance.2 Sarbanes-Oxley requires companies to implement extensive corporate governance policies to prevent and respond to fraudulent activity within the company, including vigilant self-policing to deter and quickly investigate and contain internal financial fraud.

These and other provisions require companies to closely review their policies and procedures regarding internal investigations, and implement the necessary processes and tools to respond quickly and effectively to reports of fraudulent activity.

I’ve noticed that attorneys are increasingly doing their own locates of witnesses on civil cases. The proliferation and ubiquitousness of these low-end products, on the internet, leads me to think that this is NOT a good promotional angle for investigators.

What are your observations?

http://www.peopledata.com/ seems to be getting a lot of visibility. This is not a very nuanced search, useful only for identifying people with unusual names, or in known locations. But they have a very appealing (to the inexperienced) interface.

Here’s how they describe their services:

PeopleData is the exclusive people search partner in Yahoo, AOL, MSN, InfoSpace, AT&T AnyWho, Earthlink, Dogpile and Excite etc. Over 1 million people search PeopleData every day. PeopleData was created in 2002 by the founder and original management team of US SEARCH, which led that company from its launch in 1994 to a 1999 NASDAQ IPO.

In 2004, a survey published by the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) showed that 82% of the respondents performed some degree of screening, up from 66% in a 1996 survey.

The most utilized screening tools were criminal records and past employment verification. The screening results most likely to eliminate an applicant from further consideration were falsification of employment history, criminal convictions relevant to the job, falsification of educational history, and failure to be truthful about a past criminal conviction. Poor credit and workers’ compensation history were the least likely factors to be used.

The bottom line for employers: pre-employment screening is an essential part of an employer’s duty of care towards others and part of an obligation to exercise due diligence.

The American Library Association provides a collection of resources covering the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The collection includes case law, advocacy groups and information sources. The case law collection provides citation information and a brief description of the case. It ends with links to U.S. Supreme Court resources and the First Amendment annotations to the Constitution as provided by FindLaw. The collection of resources is quite extensive and covers many worthwhile sources of information.

Brief Reporter is a legal research service dedicated to publishing top quality legal briefs from previously litigated cases in all state and federal jurisdictions. We obtain our briefs from leading attorneys throughout the country. We add new briefs every week to our growing online brief bank.

Domestic violence shelters across the country are balking at a new federal directive requiring homeless shelters to provide client information for a new national database.

HUD officials say personal information will not be linked to create the national database.

On Jan. 1, 2004, the federal privacy law that now applies to banks, airlines and broadcasters will be expanded to all businesses, large and small, across Canada.

The law (called the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Document Act, or PIPEDA) is meant to protect the private information that consumers give to companies in the course of doing business.

A federal jury has cleared ABC in a suit accusing the net’s “20/20″ newsmagazine of violating privacy laws by using hidden cameras to videotape acting workshops.

The suit, filed in May 2003 by workshop operators and actors, alleged the taping via miniature cameras was an illegal and unnecessary intrusion.

The October issue of the federal courts’ newsletter, The Third Branch, reminds readers that “[b]eginning November 1, 2004, all criminal case file documents available to the public at a courthouse also will be available remotely through the court’s electronic access system.”

If a court has not yet implemented case management/electronic case files (CM/ECF) access, then online access to the criminal files will not be available.

Moreover, “[a]s with civil and bankruptcy cases, personal data identifiers must be redacted by the filer of a criminal case document, whether the document is filed electronically or in paper. These redacted identifiers are Social Security and financial account numbers to the last four digits; the names of minor children to the initials; dates of birth to the year; and home addresses to the city and state. It is the filer’s obligation to redact these documents.”

Greg Notess’ On The Net column in the current issue of Online Magazine covers a myriad of issues for searchers, who want to identify a date for a Web page. It’s often the case that a Web server reports one date while the page displays another–if it even bothers to provide a date. Another common phenomenon is the use of Javascript to display the current date regardless of the date of publication.

Date searching is also problematic. The date provided by the search engine is often the Web server’s date stamp and sometimes the crawler’s indexing date. “The danger for the unwary information seeker is in falling into the clutches of a misleadingly dated Web page and drawing false conclusions about the page’s content based on that one date. When accuracy of chronology is essential, remember to insist on more than one date verification.”

In 1997, seven Indiana newspapers launched a groundbreaking investigation into access to public records. A statewide audit showed Indiana failing the test on access. Seven years later, another investigation shows that improvements have been made, but in some ways we’re still living in a “State of Secrecy.”