Talk about a great way to phish any unsuspecting saps who might try out the service.
Also, I'm vaguely horrified at the notion that background checks might become standard even for 'sharing economy' gigs. Ah, well, you see, your pot charge disqualifies you from picking up my laundry.
I have the privilege of being a white male who lives in a safe city and thus rarely feels threatened.
So, it's not something I think about. What's the threat model? They're going to case your house and rob you at some point in the future?
In an ideal world, that sounds plausible. Let's keep child molesters away from child care! Who can disagree with that?
But in practice, it means that all offenders are permanent second class citizens barred from non-marginal employment opportunities.
It's extremely pernicious, and you don't have to exaggerate anything to reach slippery slopes. Because there is no discretion in the system, anyone remotely tagged by law enforcement can be screwed by this.
Recently here in Canada it turns out that non-offense data was turning up in background checks. So, some guy was in the process of becoming a nurse, iirc, but was not allowed to graduate - because his neighbour five years ago was a drug dealer. That's it. The background check revealed that he was asked some questions and that's that. Four years of tuition down the drain.
If you can never find a way to reasonably support yourself, regardless of how much you've turned your life around, then we've created a self fulfilling prophesy in terms of recidivism rates.
Keep in mind we're talking about the sharing economy, which almost by definition are going to be bottom of the barrel 'gigs' to begin with.
Does it matter if person folding your laundry got into a drunken fight when they were 19? Not really.
Surely, your emotional reaction depends on how long ago the DUI was. What if they had ONE DUI ten years ago?
Armed robbery and home invasion are very different crimes. Just because they held up a liquor store doesn't mean they're going to rob you while you sit in the backseat of their car, with their picture and full identity flashing on your phone. And home invasions are crimes of opportunity.
I'm not sure I think that background discrimination is always wrong. Just that it's grossly overused, and there is no room for discretion - especially considering how many people get bullshit charges in the US.
Does a DUI disqualify you from being a good programmer, or a well respected project manager? I'm not sure that it does. Maybe you're an asshole, or maybe you did something stupid while undergoing your divorce.
It's especially egregious to start barring people from the bottom-of-the-barrel gigs as well. At that rate, you might as well never release them from prison to begin with.
> Surely, your emotional reaction depends on how long ago the DUI was. What if they had ONE DUI ten years ago?
Yeah, DUI should disqualify you from ever driving professionally IMO. Anecdotal, sure, but my experience is that people who actually have a DUI are the ones that finally got caught after years.
Then again, the well to do people I know (or ones with a well to do family) with a DUI actually got their charge reduced to reckless driving by fighting it in court, so maybe there are as many false negatives as positives.
While your points are valid, this is an automated solution. We can sit here and debate this, but software doesn't debate anything.
There will be one conditional statement.
If criminal at any point in time, deny.
That's it.
The overwhelming majority of those utilizing such services do not have the depth or foresight to distinguish between various offenses nor the time periods involved.
Why? Are they Drunk when they pick you up? If not why does not matter if they were drunk 5 years ago, or 1 day ago, they are not drunk at the moment so that is all that should concern you.
I see you have a huge amount of faith in the legal system... That is sad
Hi, I am the cofounder and I want to jump in. The Fair Credit Reporting Act regulates the background screening industry and gives rights to consumers. We cannot disclose offenses older than 7 years old.
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/pdf-0096-fair-credit-r...
If someone got a DUI last week, I would NOT want them driving me. What's your logic behind thinking that people's actions shouldn't affect their future? Seems like the majority opinion here is similar to yours, which is absolutely confusing to me. "Who cares if they raped a child last week? They aren't raping you RIGHT NOW so it doesn't matter!"
front line employees making $9/hour get screened, but executives with golden parachutes manage to get hired with falsified university transcripts, leaving trails of steaming wreckage behind them, destroying thousands of those $9/hour jobs. :(
no real relevance to what you posted, but it made me want to rant.
My friend and I hacked an API to run background checks. We wanted to show it to the HN community and get your feedback on it. You can run 1 background check on yourself for free.
If you decide to run this service for longer than a demo, you should think long and hard about its social implications. You aren't building the Therac-25, but this sort of thing does definitely have the capability to deeply screw people over.
Previous address history was pretty rough (it listed the same address twice as consecutive residences, put me in a city I'd never lived in, and got most of the dates wrong).
That being said, I'm into it. Those arguing about it's usefulness seem either oblivious to, or annoyed by, the vast number of background checks that are run in this country every day.
The fear of the SSN input in the comments is interesting. That was my knee-jerk reaction as well.
I'm not saying the fear is unwarranted, but do you know where your employer is inputting your SSN and where they keep it? How safe do you think your personal data is?
I built an employment application 'web app' for a job not too long ago. It was terrible, and against all my objections, we ended up asking for the applicants SSN. It certainly wasn't secure by any stretch of the imagination, and I cringe a little every time I see an application come in. I'm sure this sort of thing happens daily.
Anyway, I went ahead and put my SSN in to Checkr. It came up with an address I've never lived at, next to 3 addresses I actually have lived at. Not sure what that's about.
I'm not saying the fear is unwarranted, but do you know where your employer is inputting your SSN and where they keep it? How safe do you think your personal data is?
Regardless of whether I think it's safe or not, the reality is that I can sue my employer if there is something malicious. My employer is also naturally incentivized to make sure nothing happens to my identity (because if they did I'd leave the company, and he/she would lose a resource).
I'm not saying your employer would do something intentionally malicious either. That's just silly. If something happened to your identity, the breach would likely never be tracked back to your employer.
The point I'm trying to make isn't that you should go ahead and put your SSN in to random websites, but you need to realize your SSN goes a lot of places. Within the last hour I happened to find my parents' names, signatures, DoB, address, and SSNs in public documents from a county website. Keep track of your credit and watch for identity theft. Knowing that you are careful won't help as much as you think. Who knows who will end up using Checkr?
if OP open sourced the code I would feel more comfortable about it. its weird that the first thought of hesitation was "that's weird they didn't do any customization to bootstrap" then this: http://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fcheckr.io%2f
I dont see any backend language or framework. what does this mean?
It simply means there's no obvious fingerprint that builtwith.com was able to detect.
For example, the default Express app contains `X-Powered-By: Express` in the response header. Ruby on Rails is usually sniffed by its predictable cookie signature.
You gain nothing from broadcasting your back-end stack to the world.
Like someone else pointed out, it would be ideal to be able to delete reports (or at a minimum ssn information).
The site looks nice and clean. After running a report on myself, I noticed it said for a minute or so that my ssn was incorrect before it changed to stating it was cleared.
Also, while the national check for me came back clear (as expected), I was curious if that was literally all the report said. I would love to see more detailed reporting underlying the results. Obviously if it doesn't say anything more than "clear" or "no results" or something, then this probably wouldn't be useful.
Pricing-wise, I think it is somewhat fair and were I a bigger company with an HR group, you would be a solid candidate as a vendor.
As a follow-up, is your privacy policy industry consistent? For a group disclaiming any warranty over storage of personal information, it seems that much more vital that customers would have a way to manually delete and/or auto-purge the records so that we can minimize risk.
please email daniel at checkr.io and we will delete your SSN and personal data.
This is a light version of a background check (since we have to pay for it). Our pricing page references packages with extensive screenings and results.
Isn't the point of the test to get exactly what I can expect as a result as a paying customer? Otherwise, what am I really validating?
I will happily email daniel for deleting the personal data. While that works well for a HN comment thread, I still think it shouldn't require interaction on your part.
This is a genuinely hard problem and it's great to see new companies taking it on. Unfortunately this particular instance is close to useless - US only is a non starter, it's why this stuff is hard in the first place.
Dealing with country-specific services is as good as aggregating relevant databases directly.
I'd pay good money for a single API that covered most of the western world, and seamlessly integrated external services (e.g. Equifax in the UK)
I agree with you but I am wondering how would that work on a country specific level. Each country in Europe has their own privacy laws when it comes to query these kind of databases. Not to mention the EU adding another layer in the process.
Take for instance the credit scoring system. There is no such thing as Expedia or privately maintained credit scoring system outside the UK. In France, the Bank of France maintains files which are only available to financial institutions holding a licence.
Another example, in the UK, the sex offenders register is only available through the police, in other countries, there have been citizen initiatives to create such database for specific areas.
This kind of service is more realistic in the US as their SSN is the main ID for background check.
I just ran one on myself. Turnaround time was 2 hours. It came up with a ticket I got in 2009 for "Motor Vehicle Noise". I've had several speeding tickets that didn't show up, so not sure how much I would trust the data from this.
I filed a report earlier this morning on myself with an incorrect SSN (off by one digit). It came through with a 'clear' on SSN verification and background check, but reported incorrect addresses. I think you guys should look into this.
Interesting idea, but like the others I have to say there is no way I am entering my SSN into your site. I'm half convinced the fear is irrational, but there it is.
Sorry if this is not clear on the pricing page. We will make updates. The pricing is for 1 report on 1 person. Unlimited county searches in the counties where the person lived in the last 7 years.
Also, I'm vaguely horrified at the notion that background checks might become standard even for 'sharing economy' gigs. Ah, well, you see, your pot charge disqualifies you from picking up my laundry.