lack of privacy on the internet

[firecat]

Two people came to my door yesterday and asked for me by my (legal) name. They claimed to be from the company that I buy landline phone service from (AT&T) and were trying to upsell me on some more services and generally fishing for information. I told them I was happy with the services I have.

I wondered if it was a scam, but I thought "they have my name, and I don't think my full name is publicly associated with my address and phone number."

I told the OH about it and he pointed me here:

http://neighbors.whitepages.com/

I entered an address in my neighborhood. It had full names and telephone numbers associated with every house on my block.

So I take note that anyone can look up my address and associate it with my legal name. Supposedly you can remove your info from this particular site, but it would probably just pop up somewhere else.

Comments

[amadi]

That is so bogus. It's really scary, and clearly not just county clerk information, because it has the name of tenants in houses rather than owners, and there's no county database of things like that here. They're data mining elsewhere for this info.

Fortunately, my name is not attached to my home. Unfortunately, that makes it look as though my mother is a woman living alone here. It also shows my neighbor and her daughter as the only occupants of their home, and neither of their husbands, making them seem more vulnerable than they are, and consequently making them targets of the sorts who would use this info for unscrupulous purposes.

The thing that makes me most angry about this kind of thing is that when you complain about it, there are always people who say that it's paranoid, that this is information that people can find if they do records searches, etc. But this just makes it too damned easy.

[megwrites]

Yeah. After I posted that reply I kept searching. They use a number of other data mining companies and such to get this info.

I just keep seeing the possibilities for someone to look up, say, a person they've abused who is trying to leave and stay away from them, or a stalker who wants to come after someone.

Not to mention the danger of inaccurate information (of which there is much). Some angry asshat goes looking to do something nasty to someone and ends up defacing the wrong person's car/house/etc or goes in guns blazing into the wrong home because they think that their target lives there.

*shudder*.

God but we need way better privacy laws in the U.S. Badly.