If you’ve ever tried to find driving records online, you’ve probably noticed something a little… odd in your searches. No matter where you seem to look, for some reason, it seems like the information just barely avoids your grasp. Fortunately, there are other ways to go about getting this information, but why is it so difficult in the first place? It’s public information, and there are laws in place to ensure that the public can access exactly that kind of information, so why is it so hard to get?
Why is Some Public Information Harder to Get Than Others?
Before delving into the truth about driving records online, it’s important that we understand the mechanisms that make such information available in the first place. The first thing that happened that made this kind of information available at all is certain public records laws. The first and oldest law of this sort is called the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA for short.
The Freedom of Information Act was passed all the way back in the 1960s and has made public information accessible to the public. The only issue then was that a good chunk of any information you could want was stuck behind bureaucratic red tape. That means that when it first came out, most pieces of information required for a physical request to be sent in and then reviewed by the government to see if the information you’re looking for can be released. Of course, in many cases, you were likely to get the information you wanted quickly.
As time went on, different laws were passed that made information more easily available. Of course, some information is still locked behind red tape, but most of what the average person could get is easily available if you know where to look. Most of the people that are sending in paperwork are journalists and concerned citizens asking directly about what the government has been up to.
There isn’t really any specific way any given state needs to handle its public information, and because of this, it can vary greatly from state to state. Some states provide a lot of information and make it easy for anyone to access, like Alaska, and some make it a lot harder and are generally a lot less transparent, like Massachusetts. Figuring out how much information your state provides is pretty easy, and many organizations do independent studies to find out exactly how transparent any particular state government is.
All of that said, driving records are considered public information. So why is it so hard to find when looking online? If you’ve tried to check directly through the DMV, depending on the state, you may have run into a wall. In most states, the DMV requires that you have an approved reason to request someone’s driving record and also a payment to cover the processing fees.
This roadblock might make it feel impossible for you to get to the next step, especially if you don’t have a sanctioned reason to be accessing the information. The trick here is that you have to know where to look. The internet is a portal to the sum of all human knowledge so, odds are if you want to find any kind of information, you just have to know where to look to find it. This is especially true of things like public information.
How to Find the Information You Need
There are a lot of ways to find information online, and most of those ways start with a search engine of some sort. Search engines are pretty powerful tools online, and you probably use them all the time. The most popular search engine out there is Google, but there’s also Bing, Duck Duck Go, Ask Jeeves, and many others. The internet is a pretty big place, so of course, there is more than one search engine on the internet.
The vast majority of internet users use Google, so we’re going to start there. No matter what kind of information you’re looking for, Google will be able to either find it for you or point you in the right direction. It doesn’t matter what you’re looking for, generally. You can easily find everything from recipes for apple pie to history lessons so you can brush up on your knowledge about the Japanese Edo Period, for instance. Here, we’re looking for something that can be a little trickier to find, but Google or your preferred search engine will be able to help you find it still.
The first thing you need to do to find someone’s driving records online if you want to do it the most efficient way possible, that is, is a personal background check service. Personal background check services are about as old as the internet, and the way that they operate is actually pretty impressive from a computer science standpoint.
These services use a program that will scrub thousands of public information databases all over the United States. That might sound impressive already, but we’re just getting started. The system used by most personal background check services is able to scrub all of the databases simultaneously. That means that this system is able to instantly pick up a whole lot of information from all over the country.
Once you’ve found a good personal background check service, all you need to do is enter the required information, and you’ll get the search results instantly. Most personal background check services provide driving records as a bare minimum, with users often reporting that they get things like arrest records, court records, active warrant information, criminal records, and a lot more. Because these websites are scrubbing all of the public information databases that they have access to, they’re able to pull up a variety of information you would have had a hard time finding in the first place.
The reason why these personal background check services are able to get so much information is that the information is already out there, and their systems know exactly where to look for it. You could, of course, try to manually find all of the public information databases they access, but this would take months for a person to do, especially if you don’t even begin to know where to start. Search engines can only get you so far during a search like this specifically because of the way that they are designed.
Search engines conduct searches by crawling through hundreds of billions of web pages using their own spiders or crawlers. It then provides search results that appear to be the most relevant to your search, but many people are aware of this and do everything they can to get higher in the search results.
On the other hand, there are some websites that don’t want to be found and either don’t set their website up to be accessed through a search engine or actively do practices that lower their own rating. When it comes to the public information databases, they’re simply not set up in a way that Google or other search engines would find them. That means that you’re on your own trying to find the websites, and finding a website without the use of a search engine is tricky, to say the least.
If you’re up for the challenge and don’t have any pressing reason to need this information, you could definitely make it a hobby to locate these public information databases for yourself, but be aware that it will take you a lot of time to get down.
That’s why using a personal background check service is so useful. It allows you to save all of the time you would spend finding and compiling this information so you can use that time for something more important, like maybe going out for a nice day. No matter what you like to do, finding the most efficient way to get this search done will ensure that you still have the time to do the things that you love the most and not have to sacrifice it to what might end up being a wild goose chase.
Find Driving Records Easily
The internet has blessed us with more information than we know what to do with and has also opened the door to some things that we hadn’t seen in the past. Fortunately for everyone, you can find a whole lot of information about just about anyone with a few clicks of a mouse, and that information can bring you a great deal of peace of mind. Whether you’re wondering if you should trust your neighbor to drive your kids to school or you just want to find out if your co-worker has been in a car accident, you easily can if you just know where to look for it.
***SpyFly provides consumers affordable, immediate access to public record information. Federal laws prohibit businesses from using SpyFly’s service to make decisions about employment, insurance, consumer credit, tenant screening, or for any other purpose subject to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, 15 USC 1681 et seq.**