Is your date a stud or a dud? You can find out while you’re on the date and all with the help of a new cell phone app or the website by the same name… www.studordud.com. It lets you do a quick background check to find out in real time if you should stick around or maybe, just maybe sneak out the bathroom window.

Unfortunately, this type of research is becoming more and more necessary as people are connecting online prior to meeting in person. Social media is great, but as we have seen, can have a darker side, so you need to be able to do your homework before getting too involved.

So, what exactly can you find out? You would be surprised how much data is out there…bankruptcies, sex offender databases, criminal records, property ownership, evictions, address history, possible relationships, professional licenses and business licenses.  There are actually several smart phone apps and/or sites out there that do this type of checking…some even check birth date and will cross reference to horoscope, check social media and educational background data.

How well does it work? Well, I did some testing and found that most searches could find my wife, her age and even her maiden name. It could not find me, but did find people with the same name living in other parts of the USA – even though I told it to look in Baltimore. I found this interesting since I appear weekly on Fox News, in addition to writing every week for The Daily Record. The site did get my home phone right with 2 of 4 hits, but returned someone in Atlanta when I searched on my cell phone number. So overall….I would say 50/50 on accuracy.

People have been using Google for these types of searches for years now…however using Google to search for information on a prospective romantic partner can require quite a bit of scrolling when using a Smartphone. The new Smartphone specific apps, combined with the growth wireless networks, now allow for quick background checks on the go, potentially before a date is even over.

Tags: background checks, Larry Fiorino, Privacy, public search, social media

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2009 at 10:21 am and is filed under Tech Topics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.