Ding dong, Pizza’s here.
One of the frequent tasks in the practice of law is finding people. Rarely, I have the occasion to dig someone up to give them good news, like some distant relative has died, leaving them money. Most often, I need to find someone who owes a client money, or they were a witness to something and I need to find them and drag them into court to testify. To accomplish this, I rely on commercial databases that provide leads on contact information. Most people expect that personal information they give to the government will not be displayed to the world at large. To some extent this is true (the IRS discloses information regarding each federal tax return an average of about thirty times). The trend in government is to limit access to personal information. However, people freely give out information about themselves all the time to private businesses without giving it a second thought. This information is then sold off so that people like me can use it. One of the most reliable sources of contact information comes from an unexpected place:
David Coplen, the state office’s budget director, said he discovered that pizza delivery lists are one of the best sources such companies use to locate people. “There are literally millions of dollars of uncollected fines, fees and court costs out there,” Coplen said. [...] Databases compiled by private companies and government agencies are a key tool for firms such as ACS, Coplen said, and “one of the databases they find to be most helpful are pizza delivery databases.” “When you call to order a pizza, you usually give them your correct name, your correct address and your correct phone number,” he said.
Link to IP via boingboing.
The moral? If you owe people money, you might consider picking up your pizza.
