Let’s say you meet a guy or woman at a bar, and there’s a connection. What is the first thing you do?

Intelius hopes you’ll pull out your iPhone, drop $40, and make sure your potential partner is an upstanding citizen. With its new DateCheck iPhone app introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show, you can find out if he or she is actually a danger to society.

The company’s Web site already offers information on millions of people gleaned from public records. The app simply aggregates the information and presents it to you on your mobile device.

The problem is that the information is not completely accurate. To test it, I looked up someone I know. It got her address correct, but it also said that she had at one time gone by a man’s name.

DateCheck knew about minor traffic tickets, but it had no idea about her profession or her marital status.

Before you decide to spend the money to evaluate your date, you might want to try a cheaper alternative that’s worked for centuries: human intuition.