How to do a background check on yourself?
Doing a background check on yourself can help you understand what might be out there, but it’s important to know the limits. The report you buy on yourself is not the same thing as the background check an employer or landlord orders, and the law treats those very differently.
Can you buy a background check on yourself?
Yes. You can purchase a report on yourself from companies that sell “people search,” “background check,” or “self-check” products. They usually pull from public records, online databases, and old data brokers.
Those reports can be useful to spot obvious problems, like:
A criminal record that clearly isn’t yours,
Outdated address history,
Old traffic tickets or court cases still show up online.
But they’re often incomplete, out of date, or formatted very differently from the reports employers and landlords actually use.
Why a self-purchased report is not the same as an employment or housing report
Employment and housing background checks are done under specific legal rules and with specific information provided by the employer or landlord (job title, purpose, certifications, etc.).
The “background check on yourself” that you buy:
Is usually not ordered for employment or housing purposes,
Doesn’t necessarily follow the same FCRA employment/tenant standards, and
May not include all the searches a real employer or landlord would run.
So even if you find an error on a self-check report, that doesn’t automatically mean the same error exists on the report a future employer or landlord will see.
Should you dispute errors on a self-check report?
You can dispute those reports, but in many cases, there’s no real point legally:
They were not used to deny you a job or apartment.
They were not created for a specific employer or landlord decision.
Even if the company refuses to fix that consumer-only report, there’s usually no FCRA violation because no harm occurred (no adverse action, no denial, no lost housing, no lost income tied to that report).
In other words: disputing a “for your eyes only” report is optional. It might clean up what that company shows next time, but not fixing it usually isn’t a legal violation by itself.
When disputes do matter
Disputes become important when:
A background check was done for a job or apartment,
That report was used to deny, delay, or revoke an opportunity, and
The information is false, outdated, mixed with someone else, or misleading.
That’s when the FCRA kicks in, and that’s when refusing to correct a real employment or housing report can become a violation and a potential case.
So is there any point in doing a background check on yourself?
Yes, but think of it as recon, not a legal trigger. A self-check can help you:
See if there are obvious errors floating around online,
Identify old cases you may want to seal/expunge,
Get ahead of identity mix-ups before you apply somewhere important.
Just remember: the report that really matters is the one ordered for a specific job or apartment, not the generic self-check.
How We Can Help
If a background check that was actually used for employment or housing reported false information and you were denied or harmed because of it, we can review that report (not just the self-check version), help you dispute it properly, and determine whether you have an FCRA claim for compensation when the company refuses to fix clear errors.