If your contact info was listed in a public white page directory, would you be okay with someone looking up that publicly available info and posting it to millions of people on twitter?
Thanks, that's entirely reasonable. Though I would still feel uneasy to release a lot of personal information of other people (phone numbers, physical addresses, birthdays, etc.) just for autocomplete and signed up with Twitter.
If there's a large enough public interest, then information about a person can be published.
And no, I can't just create a wikipedia page for my neighbor and post their phone number there, that'd be illegal and would get me into serious trouble.
In this case it seems to just be data scraped from people’s public profiles, but would you say the same thing if their more private data, like phone number, was leaked?
No, because there is a big difference between information being technically out there on the internet and that information being harvested and sold to advertisers and other scummy organizations.
If I post my email address here that doesn’t mean I’m fine with it being crawled and sold along with a million other email addresses to spammers.
Where people live, their relatives, their social security #, their employer, it’s basically all out there. But because it’s kind of hard to extract this info from public records we enjoy relatively safe pseudonymity.
I would probably feel a little weird if someone combed through my posts or combined things I've said with search engine research to dox me, but anything posted publicly in a profile seems like fair game. If I put a link to my personal website in my profile and on my website I publish my address I have no problem being contacted that way, but if you find my address through the DNS and send me a letter it might be awkward.
Agree - what the author claims doesn’t seem likely. I would be worried about my email address leaking. My email address has my full name. So they can easily find out where I live and work if they spend a bunch of time googling my name. Exposing my Phone number would almost be preferable over exposing my email address in this scenario.
Agreed; speaking personally anyone willing to spend the 10 minutes with a whois database service, my email address and a little digging on my sites could find out pretty much every address I've ever lived at.
(bonus points if someone does it and gets all 3 :))
But I know that data exists - and for now I am happy for people to discover it about me.
Speaking for non-techy types, though, it is something to be concerned about. Less so for marketers as things like stalkers and fraudsters etc. It's worth raising these issues gently to try and encourage people to understand what data is accessible about them - and ensure their comfortable with that.
Looks cool. I can't help but think this will definitely shed some light on the risks of sharing so much personal information online, knowing all this is scraped from social media accounts - a user would surely think twice before tweeting their location in the future.
I'll take a guess that you believe real name, home address, and phone number are way up there on the "extremely sensitive" side.
Most of the American public remembers phone books. I don't think they're going to vote to make publishing the White Pages punishable by serious jail time.
That might have been ok in your small town or small city of people who didn't read the paper. An internet phone book might exist in some fashion, but I'd rather not have stalkers able to find their victims so easily for example. I agree transparency and 'honesty' are good policies in business in general, but having a name, number, and address exposed to the public seems like a bit much, no?
If anyone really wanted to they could probably figure out who you are based off your comment history, all of which is “public information.” So it’s cool if they use your name and list your address right?
Or let’s just remove you from the equation: do you agree doxxing is wrong regardless if the info is publicly available?
I too have felt its a bit strange to write down your name, phone number, maybe some other piece of contact info and submit it in order to say I want to retain my privacy and not have my contact details released to marketers.
How long until printouts of this list are found in a dumpster somewhere.
Honestly, I’m not a fan of this kind of software or websites like Whitepages.com (which should be illegal). It should be hard to find someone’s personal information if they don’t freely divulge it. If they created a username to speak freely, with no ill intent, then the dev is acting against their will by making it trivially easy to triangulate their identity. Any benefits that the software may have pale in comparison to the doxxing, spying, and voyeurism that it may enable.
If this is truly for public benefit, then the dev should at least include an opt-out mechanism.
Also, while it might not be too difficult for someone to figure out my phone number and/or email address from my name, it's not like there's a public directory of either. "Not secret" does not should not equal "public".
That's the sort of discussion I'd love to hear. There's surprisingly little about the privacy ramifications here of somehow associating real people to an online account.
Granted, the tech exists. Google has been doing it for a while now. Anyone who's gotten the little "is this you?" thing when doing a search knows what I'm talking about.
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