I wonder about treating home address as such a secret. If someone wants to kill/kidnap me, they could always find me at my workplace or on a conference or sth. So what else are people going to do with my home address? Send me a postcard?
In the good ol' days, we had this thing called "a phonebook", which was basically a big printed book of alphabetically sorted mappings of surname to phone number and home address...
Right now I can't tell if people are excited to tell me there are way to uncover my home address or they think those methods are socially appropriate and not an invasion of my privacy.
Are you sure all the people in your address book are as careless about that data? The friend with the restraining out against their ex? The minor celebrity with the unlisted phone number?
Are you happy with the possibility that a connection between you and someone else might be implied without being true? What if a known drug dealer* had your phone number in their address book? (Perhaps via a room mate or child using the landline to have called them once? Or through reuse of an expired disposable cellphone number?)
* or child pornographer, or political dissident, or terrorist, or…
Interestingly it used to be that someone would (for free and without solicitation) drop a book on my doorstep that contained a list of thousands of people's names along with their home address and telephone number. The last time I remember this happening was only 10 years ago. It's fascinating how our threat models regarding privacy have apparently changed so significantly.
>With someone's number you can very easily get a rough idea of where they live. I can imagine the living hell this creates for Domestic Violence survivors and others escaping bad situations.
Wait until you learn we used to collect everyone's name and phone number and often even their address in big books that just anyone could read. You could even have them delivered to your doorstep.
I have had individuals use my public property records in social engineering attempts. They were dumb enough to use a registered number so they knocked it off when I responded with their name and address in return, but I am sure more voracious criminals have targeted homeowners.
Yes, this is strange on all fronts. As far as I know names and land numbers are still published in phone books, and a phone number isn't generally a very interesting bit of information to have. And to the extent this information is sensitive, why be so eager to spread it (beyond being a teenager and getting a thrill)?
I mean, they could have just made the name and address public while keeping the rest private, right? I'm pretty sure that access to a phone book doesn't give you the ability to steal the identities of an entire town.
I imagine it wouldn't be that difficult to extrapolate this information from your address book: I keep my own name, phone number, address, etc. all in there, and you can probably figure out which record is mine.
From the traction this story is getting, it sure looks like address book information is considered sensitive by a lot of people. Possibly on par with location data.
Sidebar: it used to be completely normal to publish your phone number and address publicly yet far less people had the information. The people who had it were basically a subset of people in your local community. Looking back at this point in time, the world felt so huge because it wasn't so connected and centralized.
This info had a logical purpose also. Phone books without location and address would be mostly useless because lots of people share the same name.
To find the phone number of a friend having just "John Smith, USA" would be impossible (or would annoy thousands of people and require months of calls).
Yea, a great deal of information is available to the public once you have their name and city. Which isn’t really a new thing, many phone books used to include peoples address alongside their names and phone numbers.
Also the address can be used to harass or stalk women. My friend had her address in her resume and uploaded it to naukri.com. Some random guy showed up at her doorstep claiming that he had a job for her. They called the police immediately and he ran away. It was crazy and tools like this can add a note about the potential security implications.
In the good ol' days, we had this thing called "a phonebook", which was basically a big printed book of alphabetically sorted mappings of surname to phone number and home address...
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