How to Run a Free Background Check Online?

We would always love to know more about people whom we’ve just met recently. This could be your new neighbor who has come from New York or the guy you met on an online dating site. Initially, you may have thought that it was difficult to get information from the Internet about such people. However, contrary to popular perception, you can now get a ton of online information about people you’ve just met. There are many popular websites for background check and even offline methods using which you can do this which can leave you feeling confused.

This article helps you with the different methods in which you can do a free background check online. Here we give you a lowdown of different social media and other sites that can play a major role in finding the information that you want. Using these methods will help you immensely in this task. We also provide you with information about what is legal and what is not in the broad domain of conducting online background checks.

Read on to find out the different ways in which you can conduct a background check. But before that, we will explain in brief what an online background check really means.

What is a Background Check?

A background check basically means finding more information about a person whom you want to conduct a search on. This is mainly done using the social media sites that he or she visits. Modern technology also helps you to find out where the photos of that person were taken using geo-tags.

While conducting a background check on someone else, be sure to know that there is a lot of information available about you as well on these sites. Hence, you must ensure that you have seen all the information about yourself and can even fix something that has been wrongly put about yourself on the Internet. This will protect both your popularity and your reputation in the minds of society.

Now that we know what a background check is, we can proceed to find out the methods of doing the same. So here is the detailed procedure of conducting a background check.

1. Do a Google Search

The first thing that you should do is conduct a Google search. This will help you get a lot of information about the person who are researching. You can get information about the places that he or she has lived in previously or even the social media sites that he visits.

While most of the times, people use the same name throughout their profiles, some people may have aliases that you will need to know. You may even need to get permission from them to visit the social media sites that they frequent but nevertheless, you can get a great deal of information using this method.

2. Locate Where Photos Have Been Taken

With the latest geographical information available, you can easily locate where the photos put up on social media sites have been taken. This is made possible because of the geo-tags that are added along with these photos. These help in finding out the exact location where these photos were taken.

Once you know the location, you can always make out if it is near to your neighborhood or not. This will help you know how far the places where the photos have been taken from your house.

3. Find Your Neighbors

You can always find out who your neighbors are using a service like Whitepages. This is where you will get all the information about who has moved into your neighborhood recently or obviously who has been staying there for a long time.

Just be careful to follow all the norms when checking all this. Don’t go overboard because it is important to stay on the safe side of the law.

4. Use Peek You

Peek You is a service that helps you find links to people from the current social media sites. Using this service, you can get a variety of information about the kinds of friends and acquaintances the person that you are researching keeps. This will help you get detailed information about him or her and all this absolutely for free.

So these are the four main ways in which you can conduct an online background check. Apart from this, there are four famous social networking sites that will help you in your detective work. Here we mention them in detail one by one.

5. Use These Social Networking Sites

The four famous social networking sites that we will be discussing are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. While many of these sites contain a whole lot of information, here we give you a brief idea of how to use them to your maximum benefit.

5.1.  Facebook

Facebook consists of two profiles one of them is a public one whereas the other one is private. The data that is available on the public profile can easily be searched upon whereas the one which is private is obviously off limits. Nevertheless, it is a very good way to get a great deal of information about the person whom you intend to find information on. You also get a lot of photos that can easily be made use of to decipher his life history and even know what are his or her likes and dislikes. In this way, you can unearth a great deal of information about the person by just skimming through this vast repertoire of data.

5.2. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is another good social media tool that will help you get information about the working lives of people whom you want to conduct research on. You will get a detailed analysis of the professional achievements and contacts of the concerned person too. However, the flip side of this service is that you won’t get much information on their personal lives. This is because LinkedIn mainly caters to professional data and people don’t use it much for augmenting their personal lives.

5.3. Twitter

Twitter is famous for its tweets. Using Twitter will not get you as much information about the person per se but will help in identifying his or her likes and dislikes. This information can be very helpful in knowing more about the person’s social circle. It also reflects a great deal about his or her personality as well.

5.4.  Instagram

Instagram is like an album that reveals a lot about their lives. This collage of photos will give you a wide variety of information about the person as viewed from his or her photos. It is good for knowing the kind of person that he or she is and what kinds of places they visit or frequent. This definitely adds another feather to your cap.

Conclusion

From the above, we see that there are various ways in which you can run a free background check. This guide helps you get started so that you can build on the data step by step and get a lot of information that will help you find more about the concerned person.