SocietyNovember 3, 2019

I got myself Date Checked and the results terrified me

Madeleine Chapman

Editor

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What could an online private investigator discover about you? Madeleine Chapman paid $99 to find out.

When my colleague mentioned in passing that she once stood front row at a Beyoncé concert and incoherently screamed a line of a song into Beyoncé’s microphone, and that footage of the incident was somewhere on Youtube, I knew my day was ruined. I would spend as long as it took (which ended up being six hours over a long weekend) to find the video. Even now, years later, I can’t provide a logical explanation for my very sudden obsession with not even discovering but simply confirming the presence of an obscure video. Sometimes you just want to know.

My wanting to know was pointless. I want to know everything, all the time, regardless of its pertinence. Most of the time the things I want to know serve no purpose beyond scratching an itch in my mind. But sometimes that itch is intuition, and wanting to know becomes needing to know. Having suspicions about someone you’ve just met is a survival itch, and Date Check NZ has come along, promising to scratch it.

Launched by private investigator Cheney McGlynn in March 2019, Date Check offers a “swift, simple and thorough online background check”, specifically on people you may have met through a dating app. The hook is the price ($99 flat rate) and the convenience (simply fill out a short online form and provide an email address to receive the results). The website and instagram page are pink and almost cheerful, with a lot of memes, which has the effect of playing down the serious nature of background checks.

a fun approach to private investigations

McGlynn has spoken about her motivations for setting up the service, the primary one being safety. For $99, women (and it is mostly women who would feel compelled to use such a service) can purchase peace of mind about a potential suitor. Or they can purchase confirmation that they’ve been conned. Or they can purchase knowledge about a person for no other reason than curiosity.

I was curious. I wanted to know what others could learn about me if they, like me, just wanted to know. I asked my colleague to order a Date Check on Madeleine Chapman. She filled out the form accurately but vaguely. Address: “near Dominion Rd”. Birthday: “pisces”. Known associates: “Duncan Greive, Alex Casey, Steven Adams, Christel Chapman.” It took five minutes, no interaction, and the order was placed. I was nervous. I had nothing to be nervous about; I’m an open book and regularly share personal details within my work (like right now), but the thought of someone snooping gave me pause. What if they could somehow investigate my inner thoughts and share my deepest insecurities with, as far as they knew, a total stranger?

Date Check didn’t share my darkest secrets with my colleague but they did share something equally scary: my home address.

If I wanted to, I could learn everything there is to know about, say, Lemsip, which I can see on my colleague’s desk right now. The origins, the active ingredients, the interactions that occur internally once it’s been ingested. If I learned all of that, I would be smarter. But at the same time as wanting to know how a human body fights influenza, I want to know, with equal intensity, the full life story of the person who works across the office from me and with whom I very occasionally converse. Knowing everything about this person won’t make me smarter in any real sense. I just want to know.

But just because knowledge is accessible doesn’t mean everyone should have it. In promoting Date Check on The AM Show, McGlynn drew from recent tragedies around online dating encounters gone horribly wrong to emphasise the importance of the service she offered. While she didn’t say Date Check could have prevented such tragedies, she did suggest it could help other women by revealing dangerous potential suitors. But the service isn’t limited to women and it isn’t limited to those with good intentions.

My colleague provided only my name and email (I’m a writer online with a very public work email) and in return received my home (as well as work) address. Replace “my colleague” with someone sinister and the distribution of such information feels not just unnecessary but unsafe.

All the information given to Date Check feat. how I assume a catfish would send a selfie

The address given given to my colleague by Date Check is in fact my old address and, more pertinently, where my aunt and uncle still reside. It concerns me that their address could be given out to a complete stranger for $99. And while I know that all information given by Date Check is technically in the public realm, I have no idea how they found it. My own subsequent search of my name + the address didn’t provide any results, suggesting a casual snooper wouldn’t uncover it, and for good reason.

I’m aware that a full-time private investigator would probably offer a whole lot more about me to a stranger, but there’s a chasm between someone who would go through the process of hiring and paying for a private investigator, and someone who would fill out a brief online form. The practice offered by Date Check isn’t new. But the ease with which anyone can engage with it, particularly those with bad intentions, is.

McGlynn also told a number of personal anecdotes to prove why her product was essential. One involved her friend meeting a man over the phone who had “implied” that he was good looking but refused to FaceTime. She used Date Check and “we did a bit of digging and found out that actually he was a bald, overweight alcoholic”. Putting aside the truth that beauty is subjective, sometimes knowledge is meant to be given, not discovered.

Telling a potential partner of addiction struggles, or any struggles, rarely happens in the early conversations. And discovering that your date isn’t as good looking as they appear in their carefully curated online profile is the third certainty in life after death and taxes. I’m sure the specific example McGlynn spoke of was indeed a catfish situation, but baldness and addiction struggles are not indicators of predatory behaviour, even if they are revealed by a private investigator.

My colleague sent through my completed Date Check report as soon as it arrived, adding only “I didn’t know your dad was from Nebraska”. Aside from giving my (previous) address, the Date Check offered a rudimentary bio, particularly for a subject who is Very Online. It was so rudimentary that when I asked The Spinoff’s intern to find everything she could online about Madeleine Chapman in 30 minutes, she did a far better job.

Date Check got some minor details wrong (my university degree, the number of siblings I have, and when I returned to New Zealand), but recovered enough to deliver the devastating one-two punch of “We have been unable to locate any information regarding the subject and any previous relationships.” and “The subject does not own any property.”

Besides the home address, intern Hannah found all the information Date Check found, with greater detail and accuracy, and only made one error; assuming I own the property I currently live in. She too managed to include a devastating burn, ending her report with “enjoys Harry Potter”.

Date Check purports to be a safety measure for those concerned that the person they’ve met online is not who they say they are. But with no human interaction, and virtually no real information required to order one, Date Check leaves itself open for exploitation. They did not “confirm my identity” because my colleague offered very little resembling one in the first place. Instead they provided it, virtually from scratch, and complete with locations but not much else.

Date Check promises “honest advice”, suggesting there is a judgment presented by the investigator after completing their research. I don’t know what their advice would be if they discovered a bonafide scam artist, but the final sentiment in my report felt both vague and pointed.

“Please note the subject is known in the comedy and news community and has many followers, some who do not agree with what she writes.” You’ve been warned.

If Date Check promises to vet a person and confirm whether or not they are who they claim to be, it’s possible to do so without potentially endangering that person by also providing details of where they live to whoever is willing to pay $99. And as for all the rest? The education, the travels, the opinions with which some people disagree, the embarrassing concert cameos? It’s 2019 and the world lives online. All the information is right there if you just want to know.

Safe at last in New Zealand, the newly-arrived Polish children face the camera with their parcels, 1944 (Alexander Turnbull Library)

SocietyOctober 31, 2019

The Polish children and everyone after: 75 years of welcoming refugees

Ann Beaglehole

Guest writer

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Safe at last in New Zealand, the newly-arrived Polish children face the camera with their parcels, 1944 (Alexander Turnbull Library)

Today marks 75 years since the first official refugees – Polish children fleeing the horrors of World War II – arrived in New Zealand. On the anniversary, historian Ann Beaglehole reflects on our history of settling refugees.

Hundreds of smiling school children, waving New Zealand and Polish flags, greeted the Polish children when they arrived in Wellington on 31 October 1944. It was a big day for Wellingtonians – the weather had put on a great show and the excitement of the arrival of the ship could be felt throughout the capital city.

Wellington offered a warm welcome to the 733 Polish children and the 102 caregivers travelling with them. One of the children, Jan Wojciechowski, recalled that when he climbed up into the train which would take them to the children’s camp at Pahiatua, he was handed a bottle of milk, a carton of ice cream and a boxed lunch, prepared by New Zealand Red Cross.

Among the victims of World War II were thousands of Polish children uprooted from their homes, who had lost one or both parents, and who had known years of war, hunger, prison camp life and disease. The Polish children who came to New Zealand in 1944 were the first refugees to be distinguished from other migrants in New Zealand’s official statistics. The country’s formal refugee resettlement programme is usually considered to have begun with their arrival. The children came to spend the duration of the war in New Zealand but, owing to the political situation in Poland after the war, they were accepted for permanent settlement rather than returning to Europe as originally planned.

Polish children and NZ Red Cross nurses, 1944 (Archives of New Zealand Red Cross)

The idea of giving asylum to as many of the Polish children as possible came from Countess Wodzicka, the Polish Red Cross delegate in New Zealand, and wife of Poland’s Honorary Consul Count Kazimierz Wodzicki. She suggested it to her friend Janet Fraser, the wife of then Labour Prime Minister Peter Fraser.

It has now been 75 years since the Polish children found safety in New Zealand – 75 years of what we now call ‘refugee resettlement’ in New Zealand. It is important to note that there were refugees in New Zealand before 1944, though not categorised as such.

Since 1944, New Zealand has accepted more than 35,000 refugees. Although the number is not large relative to the many millions of refugees and displaced people in the world, it is significant for a country of this size.

One of New Zealand’s outstanding achievements over the 75 years has been in enabling volunteers in communities to be involved in resettling refugees. In the 1970s, New Zealand relied on the Interchurch Commission on Immigration and Refugee Resettlement (ICCI), which later re-formed as the Refugee and Migrant Service (RMS), to harness volunteers as sponsors. The volunteers, many from religious organisations, had a vital role in helping refugees, particularly with their housing, language and employment needs. At its best, sponsorship led to the formation of life-long friendships between sponsors and newcomers.

Soldier holds a young child at the camp for Polish refugees in Pahiatua. Photograph taken 1945 by John Pascoe. (Ref: 1/4-001366-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand)

In 2012, New Zealand Red Cross became the lead agency responsible for settling quota refugees and for harnessing community volunteers. New Zealand Red Cross, well-known for its strong presence in communities and thousands of volunteers, supports former refugees to rebuild their lives in Aotearoa.

It is remarkable how many New Zealanders, located far away from the world’s conflict zones, have wanted to be involved with helping refugees. Acting as individuals, or within community groups, they have devoted themselves to the rescue of victims of violence and persecution in distant places. They have believed they lived in a lucky country and therefore should take some responsibility for the less fortunate in the world.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, New Zealand led the world in the acceptance of refugee families then considered by other countries as ‘hard to settle’ (usually because the ‘bread winner’ was over 45 years old, or a member of the family had a disability of some kind).

In 1973 Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk told UNHCR (the UN Agency for Refugees) that his Cabinet would be sympathetic to welcoming more refugees who were considered harder to settle, for he would not like New Zealand to be a country which did not take its fair share of such international responsibilities. New Zealand remains one of the few countries in the world today which welcomes refugees with disabilities or needing medical attention.

The author was herself a refugee, arriving in New Zealand from Hungary in 1957. Left: The author (Ann Szegoe, left) and friends eating their first bananas in Vienna after crossing the border from Hungary to Austria, December 1956. Right: Mother and child: Eva Szegoe and daughter Ann on board the ship Sibajak sailing to New Zealand, August 1957.

Seventy-five years on, we celebrate New Zealand’s achievements in welcoming refugees and saving the lives of thousands of people. However, the country’s past policies were restrictive; discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and religion characterised New Zealand’s immigration and refugee policy until the late 1980s. Chinese, Jews and Muslims were among the targets for rejection. Under the 1931 Immigration Restriction Amendment Act, Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis were denied entry; those asking about entry were told it was hardly worth them applying because non-Jewish applicants were regarded as more suitable type of immigrant.

A major shift in policy in 1987 ended selection based overtly on ethnicity and religion. New Zealand’s annual refugee quota was established then, set at 800 refugees. It formalised New Zealand’s commitment to settling refugees, replacing the earlier piecemeal approach of individual quotas. In 1997 the quota was reduced to 750 annually and the government agreed to pay the travel costs of refugees. The Labour-led government increased the quota to 1000 in July 2018.

By the early 1990s, the process for setting the annual quota involved: first an approach to New Zealand from UNHCR to accept refugees in greatest need of resettlement; after which New Zealand officials selected refugees with emphasis on the humanitarian aspects of each case. Since 2012, New Zealand has focused on resettling refugees in the Asia-Pacific region. In October 2019, the Government announced that the much-criticised family links policy, which had impacted the selection for the quota of refugees from the Middle East and Africa since 2009, would be stopped.

Refugee policy has close links to immigration policy and to foreign relations. New Zealand’s changing response to pressures from Britain, USA and UNHCR has had major impact on resettlement. The country’s resettlement story over 75 years must also be seen in the context of massive changes in New Zealand over that time, not least becoming a more culturally diverse society through international migration. Former refugees in New Zealand used to be predominantly from Europe. This changed over the years since 1944 to refugees coming mainly from Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

Looking back at New Zealand’s unique approach to refugee resettlement over 75 years sheds light on present refugee resettlement issues. One of these is ensuring refugees come to a welcoming community. Most New Zealanders have so far resisted populist and exclusionary ideologies, with their focus on ‘alien’ outsiders, prevalent in many places overseas. At a time when we have recently experienced the worst terror attack in our history, with the shooter’s victims including refugees, there are challenges ahead. But there is every reason to suppose they will be overcome.

Ann Beaglehole is the author of ‘Refuge New Zealand: A Nation’s Response to Refugees and Asylum Seekers’ (Otago University Press). She came to New Zealand as a refugee from Hungary in 1957. This piece was commissioned by the New Zealand Red Cross.