Background check found bad relative

[manderly6]

I don't think you did anything wrong. You simply gave information to someone else that they asked you to follow up on. It was entirely in the hands of the tenant as to what to do with that information.

I would also assume doing a "google search" on someone has become pretty standard these days for a multitude of things.

[fallingwater]

Ya, I agree. I would hate for others to judge me on who is in my family. Sometimes errors are made as well though. About 16 yrs ago my husband and I returned home after a really nice dinner. There was a message on our machine. It was detective from a police dept. from a city about an hour from us. He was very curt and left a message stating for my husband to simply come into the station so there wouldn't be any further trouble. My husband called them back asking what the problem was. After a brief conversation of this officer blaming my husband for different things, turns they called the wrong house and the wrong guy.

We experienced other odd events and finally we discovered there is a guy with the same name as my husband, same birthdate and even more bizarre this other guy's social security number is only a few digits off from my husband's. This other guy is a career criminal. Ugh. Its been quiet for sometime now so either the guy turned his life around, is in prison or died. I would hate to think what google would produce if someone tried out my husband's name.

[Lacerta]

We're just going to have to disagree on this one, I think.

I truly don't see anything unethical or illegal in telling the tenant. Not telling them would have been an ethical problem for me. They asked me to help screen a roommate, and tell them what I found in my search, so they could make a decision with all the information readily available. That is exactly what I did. That is exactly what I would want my landlord to do if our positions were reversed.

It wasn't an issue because it wasn't the applicant, but it WAS an issue for two reasons. 1) Because it could have easily been misconstrued by a casual search AS being the applicant. By telling the tenant what I found, I may very well have stopped her from rejecting him based on a panicked reaction to her own incomplete findings. I believe it is always better to know than not to know. But even if she had rejected him, not liking someone's relatives or friends, or even acquaintences, or even not liking someone's name, is not a Fair Housing violation. If I had an applicant named Michael Jackson, and I didn't like the singer, I could turn the person down based on their name. And 2) if I were the tenant, it would be enough of an issue for me that I would want to have that conversation with the prospect. If the person isn't a relative or a friend, great, my mind is at ease, but if they are, I want it agreed up front that that person is not to have my address, since I don't want them showing up at my door if they get out of prison. If they wouldn't agree to that, then I wouldn't agree to sublease to them. If they truly are estranged from the person, then it shouldn't be an issue.

And quite frankly, if I were the prospective roommate in this situation, coming from a small town like that, he is at least aware of the "same name as a criminal" situation, since his name was all over his local news a few years ago, and I would have been prepared to talk about it if it came up. I might even have just addressed it up front, approaching it head on. Honestly, I would probably change my name, or at least go by my middle name. It is going to come up as an issue more than once in his life, which is unfortunate, but still reality. People "google" their friends, or significant others all the time, just out of curiousity. He's had that conversation before and he will have it again.

I don't really think you guys are being realistic on the information age we live in. I guarantee you that there are people out there who have been turned down for jobs they applied for because of information the potential employer found on the internet, whether accurate or not. If you post something stupid on your blog, facebook, myspace, twitter, etc, you have to be prepared for it to come back to bite you.

If used intelligently, with some filters in your brain regarding reliability, the internet can be a very useful tool. It can sometimes give some reliable information (after all, we pull credit reports off a website on the internet), more often, it can at least prompt questions to ask. I have never turned down a tenant based solely on something I found on the internet, but I have caught applicants lying about rental history (leaving a place out and saying they lived with family during that time, when in fact, they trashed a rental), smoking, pets, and jobs (listed their friend's phone number as their contact person at work, assuming we would just call the number listed, turns out they didn't even work for that company anymore). I will continue to use the internet as part of my screening process.

[fraydnerv]

I will clarify my position. There is a difference, in my opinion, in a LL using the internet to access the official/legal channels of information they are entitled to as a LL, and just searching the internet in general to see anything/everything that might possibly be the prospective tenant or not.
You say you will continue to use the internet, as well you can. It's apples and oranges. One is using the internet to access the proper avenues, the other is just leaping off the edge to see what pops up.
Common sense or not, I don't believe it's the ethical approach as a business person. I would hold the same position if a prospective employer based his hiring on what they found on Google. I'm sure it goes on, but is not generally announced. You announced it, so you will get the feedback.