Why Does Fama Require Three Identifiers?

One of the most frequent questions we receive on our support channels is: ‘Why does Fama require three identifiers to match social media profiles to my subject?’ Many times this question comes out of concern for the potential of a result not appearing on a report. Customers often wonder why we have built this requirement into our platform. I’m going to answer that in this post, but first, a little history: 

The “John Doe” Problem

A big challenge for a company in our sector is solving the “John Doe problem.” In other words, how do we accurately find a person’s social media profiles, web results, etc with only basic resume information? This is especially challenging with common names, whether it’s John Doe or Maria Garcia.

As more and more states have restricted the ability for employers to ask candidates for their social media handles as part of the screening process, it is incumbent upon firms like Fama to find these profiles based on ‘identifiers’ like name, email, location, employer history, education history, etc. Over years of testing and iteration, we have come up with a patent-pending process that blends AI and a trained investigator into a single workflow to find accurate profile results more than 99% of the time. For more information on how that process works, check out this explainer guide. A cornerstone of that process is matching on three identifiers. But why three?

The Compliance Minimum

It starts with compliance. For a screening business to be FCRA and GDPR compliant, we are required to pursue maximum possible accuracy in our reporting. This is the same set of requirements for any type of complaint, employment-related screening, especially background checks. Over the past few decades, the FTC (which governs the FCRA in the US) has come up with a ‘three identifier’ minimum to ensure maximum possible accuracy in reporting. In other words, to include a profile or web results on a report, we need to match that result against three identifiers provided to us by the customer or identifiers we’ve confirmed through our proprietary confirmation process. The FTC issued this guidance after years of data analysis, litigation review, and qualitative interviews with users and executives in the industry. Large firms in our industry have had to settle massive class action lawsuits for only matching against two identifiers. In short, matching against three identifiers is a compliance requirement and protects our customers and their candidates.

But, FCRA Compliance Is Not A Requirement for My Use Case

Still, there are more reasons beyond compliance to use three identifiers. After all, we have non-FCRA and non-GDPR use cases across our customer base. Should they get the same treatment? 

We tasked our Fama Labs team with the tough question: setting compliance aside, is it even feasible to match social profiles/web results with a person using two identifiers alone? Further, would we achieve a meaningful level of accuracy that would increase customer trust in our platform? 

The results were clear. We quickly found that more than 32% of profiles we ‘matched’ against two identifiers were about the wrong person. This compares to under 1% of profiles being the wrong person when matched against three identifiers. In practical terms, it makes sense. Consider a person named Bob Johnson who resides in Scottsdale, AZ. There are 40+ Bob Johnson’s that match those two identifiers on LinkedIn alone. It wouldn’t be right to ‘guess’ on an individual’s web presence - for both the subject being screened and the customer.

We understand it is frustrating that these requirements might mean that in a small percentage of the time we may not be able to include a social media profile. We put these controls in place to both increase accuracy at scale and keep our customers safe and compliant. If you have any further questions please reach out to your account manager or contact sales@fama.io.