too much information
in all the wrong hands.
The properly paranoid can now relax, BeenVerified is available for Android and iPhone platforms: so you can check out the history of anyone you meet instantly - if they're American, anyway. The service has been around as a website for a while, checking different publicly available sources of information and compiling a report …
There are absolutely no AdamFoxtons who have committed any crime that their search thing can pick up.
<daily mail witchhunter> However, there are a few "Sarah Bee"s listed- that must be why she left. Clearly she's a violent paedo-terror-witch, or she wouldn't show up on this service!</daily mail witchhunter>
Apparently Gizmodo argument is that i's not creepy because you can get all the same info from extensive Google "sleuthing". Which I must assume is in turn not creepy because you can get all the same info by stalking your target for years, shirley?
Also, Vimeo apparently is one of these braindead sites which blocks content when they encounter an unfamiliar user-agent. Muppets. They want me to install Safari. Better and better. I thought the "this site was coded for Internet Explorer, please install it and come back" behaviour died in the nineties, back to life? It seems like more and more websites just choke on user-agents they don't recognise. Even the reputable US National Library of Medicine tells me: "We are sorry, but NCBI web applications do not support your browser, and may not function properly." even though my user-agent string specifies that my browser is " like Firefox/3.5.17", which is "supported"*, apparently. You'd think that the NIH could hire semi-competent web devs, no?
*what these clowns mean by a website "supporting" a browser is beyond me but that's another problem.
In Australia, there are almost no legally accessible databases that this thing could use. It could be a handy tool for a licencsed Private Investigator but they have tools like this already.
So it is only creepy if the society the software operates in is sufficiently creepy to allow it.