I maintain an account at one of those background search sites in order to keep track of certain things, plus check out new situations that come up. I'd been having to maintain contact information on an old business partner for over 15 years now and nothing much had been changing. But lately a thing or two DID change - at least with respect to my ability to be aware of what went with whom.
I suspect that many adjustments have been made to the ability to mine the data important to me since I became associated with this person. Tools have gotten better, data sets/lakes/blobs have been purchased or combined... heck, even leaked. However it happened, all this would naturally suggest security problems but there's also a kind of service improvement. Where I had been confused about the relationships between data "items", some of those mysteries are now solved.
The person I followed after the business relationship ended (and follow to this day for compliance and legal reasons) had a fairly common name, altuhough there were identically named people that I could tell bore no resemblance to the person I knew. But there were other issues apparently unrelated that did appear to lead back to the same person, same address, same region, same zip code, same potential email addresses, same potential social media accounts, same approximate age and so on. But there wasn't enough data or similar potential data (or whatever a better database term would be) to nail down a connection.
That was then; this is now.
However my search site is doing it, I'm now able to see totally contradictory claims that lead back to the SAME EXACT INDIVIDUAL. If you'd looked up info on someone in the past, you might try it again for some surprises. Better ability to correlate matters like past businesses owned, previous potential relatives and neighbors, whatever legal info doesn't require a trip to the courthouse, sex offender registrations... All this material could even be historical - out there already - but previous search methods and tools couldn't establish good connections. But now that's much improved from, say, a decade ago. I'm now able to see that the person I used to trust makes Nixon look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
There you are - actual positive and upbeat information from me for a change. Or at least more upbeat than usual.
