Turn a name into a sourced profile of one specific human. The work is 20% finding data and 80% proving the data belongs to your subject and not to someone with the same name. Beginners collect first and disambiguate later; that is how you end up with a confident, well-cited dossier describing two different people fused into one. Bind the name to a second selector before you collect anything.

Write down, before searching: the subject, the objective, what is in bounds, what is out of bounds, and which jurisdiction's law governs you and the subject. Read ../../ETHICS.md.

Built for: counterparty and investor due diligence, fraud and asset investigation, journalism, skip tracing and debt recovery, missing persons, pre-employment integrity checks on senior or fiduciary roles, and personal self-defense — running yourself to see what an attacker would find.

Out of bounds, always: establishing a private individual's home address, routine movements, children, medical status, immigration status, or sexuality for any purpose other than a documented lawful one; anything that puts you in contact with the subject; and any use a reasonable person would call surveillance. If your objective is to confront, embarrass, or reach the subject in person, stop. See also the US employment-and-tenancy restriction in , which binds a large share of the sources here.

Done when the scope note exists in the case file, names a lawful objective, and states an explicit out-of-bounds list.

Never search on a name alone. Pick an anchor and carry it into every query.

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Common-name subjects need two anchors, not one. Non-Latin-script names need the native-script spelling plus the transliterations actually used in your sources — search all of them, because registries, papers, and press each pick a different romanisation.

Done when you can state a discriminating test — "my subject is the one who worked at X in Y" — that you will apply to every candidate record.

Cheapest, highest-yield, lowest-noise first. Do not start with data brokers; they will hand you plausible wrong answers before you have a way to reject them.

Full source catalogue with what each one can and cannot prove: reference/source-catalogue.md.

Done when each layer has been worked or explicitly recorded as not-applicable, with a reason.

Every claim gets, at capture time: the claim, the source URL, the access date, a saved copy or archive snapshot, and which anchor let you attribute it to your subject. Reconstructing citations at the end always fails — the page will have changed, and you will no longer remember why you believed record 14 was the right person.

Corroboration standard: two independent sources per claim. Independent means different origin, not different website. Three brokers agreeing is one source, because they buy from each other. A company bio and a press release from the same communications team is one source. A registry filing and a bylined news article are two.

Done when every claim in the case file carries a source, a date, and an attribution basis.

Actively hunt the disconfirming detail. Signals you have crossed onto a namesake: an age or graduation year off your band by more than a few years; a location with no plausible bridge to a known one; a career discontinuity requiring two full-time roles at once; a middle initial that conflicts rather than merely being absent; a relatives cluster sharing no member with the one you already had.

Do not quietly drop the record. Split the file: maintain a candidate set, and record for each candidate what would confirm or eliminate it. Fusing two people destroys the whole product, and it is invisible in the finished brief unless you tracked candidates explicitly.

Done when every collected record is assigned to a named candidate, and the non-subject candidates are documented rather than deleted.

Only when the objective requires it. Obituaries name survivors with relationships and cities and are the most efficient family-structure source there is; genealogy and civil-registration indexes give births, marriages, and deaths where published; co-directorships and co-authorship give professional associates. Treat relatives as context for disambiguation, not as targets — pivoting a full investigation onto an uninvolved family member is out of bounds.

Done when relationships used in the brief are sourced, and no uninvolved third party has been profiled.

Hand off to . Separate confirmed facts from inference, state the disambiguation basis up front, list the candidates you eliminated, and cut anything collected that the objective does not need.

Done when the brief states its confidence grade per claim and its disambiguation basis, and the surplus collection has been deleted.

Grade the identity attribution separately from the claim. A court record can be entirely genuine and still not be your subject's.

Objective: pre-investment diligence on "Marcus Rowntree", named as CTO of a vendor, anchor = the employer.

In the EU and UK, profiling a living person is processing personal data: you need a lawful basis, and journalism, legal claims, and legitimate interests are distinct bases with distinct limits. The subject may hold access and erasure rights against you. In the US, using aggregator data for employment, tenancy, insurance, or credit decisions outside a regulated consumer reporting agency is a compliance violation however public the data feels — see . Driver and vehicle records are restricted-purpose in many jurisdictions. If your research is adverse and might reach proceedings, capture evidence so it survives challenge: timestamped, hashed, archived.

For self-defense, run this workflow on yourself, use the opt-out guidance in , and use so the searching itself does not create new exposure.