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What Can You Find Out About Yourself, Online?
TexTex asks: "So, I'm doing the usual looking-up-of-phone-numbers-and-addresses thing today, and I'm starting to wonder exactly how detailed some of these engines get. www.555-1212.com and www.switchboard.com are giving me different address with the same phone number, but a reverse phone lookup on www.whowhere.com spits out a third. Granted, I haven't moved around that much in the past five years...but somebody thinks I did. Certain folks who sell background checks and missing persons searches seem to have access to all the cool toys. Land purchase records, post office change-of-address cards, the works. Are these kinds of listings available on the Web?" You'd be surprised at the amount of information about yourself that exists in public records. What are the tools these searching services use, to gain access to this online and how can we (not some company making a profit) gain access to them?
"Freebie searches aside, it seems it is much much easier to find information on someone who's dead than it is on our living friends. ancestry.com does an amazing job of providing info, most of all for free, but I want more. I want more complete info and I don't wanna pay $29.95 for it from the man."
(Hey, how much do you trust your local ISP?)
Now, you might argue that this is going to result in a lot of harassment, either from individuals (not too likely) or from spammers and business (likely). But the same argument used against gun control applies here too. If data is outlawed, only outlaws will have data. If everyone has access to information on everyone else's personal lives, nobody will actually make use of it for fear of repercussion. Is DoubleClick annoying you? Post information about the CEO's secret affairs and watch the media jump all over the company!
We can only fear data when it is not available to everyone. Privacy is not a "right"; it is an encumberment to freedom. You can't have both free data and privacy. And when it comes to down to the decision, data can only help us move forward. You can't say that about privacy.
how can we prevent our info from getting on these sites in the first place? I don't know about everyone else, but I don't like the idea of every Tom, Dick and Harry being able to look up my address and other personal contact info. I know this information is publically available in regular phone books, but last I checked, we have the option of remaining unlisted.
Check out http://www.knowx.com . A friend of mine works there. You can find out just about anything if you've got the nickels. I got a report that told me my own stats plus those of my neighbors and the median income level of my neighborhood.
I found myself on 555-1212, much to my surprise as I've only lived in this location for 2 months and I was entered twice (both with incorrect spellings). What's even worse are the tie-ins that companies like these use. At 555-1212, I could search public records, that required me to provide even more information, or I could look for classmates from high school, which required a host of information about my high-school years. And people will just enter this stuff. They have no worries.
Personally, I'm careful with the information that I give out, but I'm not paranoid. I know people can find out a lot about me with just very simple searches like this, but at the same time, I don't fill out surveys, I don't fill out sweepstakes registration, and I'm sure as hell not giving out any more personal information than I need to. Unfortunately, many of these sites present that personal information as information necessary to look up your request, which just isn't true, and people freely give it cause they're greedy for the specific information they want.
But again, I'm not intent on hiding my information. I just want to make sure that it's protected so that only I can change it and so that I can determine how it's used. I haven't heard any successful ideas on how to manage that.
Give Egosurf a try... it gives some rather interesting results.
Some public records are not on line, but private companies wade through them and sell the info. Most of these companies are set up to distribute to the same large companies which deal with the large government collections.
Individuals and companies who need such info then subscribe to those large collectors, or buy individual records through private investigators and credit reporting services. There also is cross linking, such as when you hire a P.I. in your city and they hire one in another city to go look up records in a distant courthouse.
But it's often easier for individuals to just pay one of those services than go get individual copies from the original sources.
I have an unlised phone number and I've tried to find my information online and have thankfully been unsuccessful. The only place that I've been able to find myself is classmates.com and that is something that I actually registered for.
I would bet that all of the information that they are getting is coming from public information e.g. documents filed by the court, phone book, web sites you've registered at...
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
In all three of the directories mentioned in the article.
I haven't spent any amount of effort in trying to hide myself. I wonder how they put this data together. They're not checking phones, since I've got a whole three of them. They're not checking emails of web registrations. They're not checking property ownership records, because I do own a home.
I think I used to be able to find myself when I used switchboard.com, and get lots of really ancient addresses, phones and email addresses, going all the way back to '91. But it looks like I've been deleted from there!
I think I probably ought to be happy about this. But it still makes me wonder how they try to fill those databases up.
Also, there are companies out there that have subscription services that will perform almost real time searches through the public records and those records are incredibly accurate. These services don't have an "opt out", which is why collection agencies, subpeona services, etc subscribe to them, because it means that they can find a client and serve them in an afternoon
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Doesn't the US have laws about reverse lookup?
It caught me a bit by surprise because for a long time, we've had legislation that restricts various types of searching on databases - electronic or not. (This is in New Zealand, and I'm sure many other countries also.)
The flagship example is that phone companies aren't allowed to make directories searchable by phone number - by anyone outside the phone company, at least. (Similarly, a phone book can't be indexed by number.) I'm not sure of the specifics, but I think anyone who slapped their own reverse index on someone else's database would also be in trouble.
For the same sorts of privacy reasons, we're not allowed to use one organisations primary key as a primary key in a second organisation's database. Does the U.S. have something like this? It's annoying sometimes that I can't just use someone's IRD number (like a social security number) for a primary key, but there are important ethically based database synchronization reasons for why it's not allowed.
===
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Reverse look-up of phone numbers isn't new. You used to be able to (maybe still can?) look through a printed reverse look-up phone book at a city or county government office. They were a tool for journalists, but probably pretty inaccurate with people moving and whatnot.
The first time I did a search on google for my name. I have wondered ever since who has linked to those ZDNet talkbacks. Every time I go back I always get surprises.
For instance Usenet articles from the early 90's have be immortalized by David Rusin. A very bad example of my early code has been rediscovered, a random letter in soc.culture.bahai has turned up, etc.
Sometimes I just have to wonder...
If you have been online for any time, try your own name. You may be surprised...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
I must be doing something right. I ran searches on each of the mentioned directory searches, and NONE of them had a listing for me in any of the locations I have lived in for the last three plus years. And I haven't tried living anonymously.
Gonzo
I've given up on protecting "my info." But I do feel MUCH better knowing the routes it takes as it hops from marketer to marketer.
These are some tactics that have worked quite well for me.
1) Add a bogus 2nd address line to every form you fill out: Delta Airlines thinks I live in Apt# D, United thinks I live in Apt# U.
2) Pay for the unpublished (not unlisted) option from your local phone company. (This is huge: local telcos are egregious sellers of info.) Why exactly I have to pay $.75 each month to NOT have my info sold is beyond me.
3) Spend a few hours every month removing yourself from such engines. Often one database will feed several rebranded engines.
4) Go to junkbusters.org and use their opt-out engine. It takes a bit of doing, but its worth it: just enter your info once, and it'll create foldable, mailable, one-page "gimme off your damn list" letters.
I'm under no illusions: these tactics just help me SEE who is selling my info.
Gnutella facilitates crime eh...?
I would be willing to bet on the fact that far more illegal activity takes place via internet explorer than by gnutella. Yet we dont blame microsoft because their browser lets you downlod copyrighted music.
Hell we should whip intel engineers for not making a pentium that has built in copyright checking.
People are the cause of crime. Guns dont cause murders and murders happen without guns. It's people and to some extent principles (or differences therin) that cause crime.
There are a couple of other Ben Tillys out there. I always wonder if there is any relation...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
First of all, I am Joe Average of the internet. I have a few a few pages up, I've moved them around a couple of places and was surprised to find ancient URLs of my pages.
What surprised me more is that sites I never heard of (much less visited) advertised a couple of my pages. I don't have much personal information on my pages, but I suddenly thought of all the resumes I've seen online.
Resumes with full contact information of people much more important than me, put up for everyone to see. Then I thought of all the other Joe Averages out there, with pages saying "My name is Joe and I like motorboats, the color blue and Budweiser."
What if somebody out there is actually reading all these pages? It seems like a mundane job, but it seems people will do anything for a buck these days. Some loner sits at his/her terminal for 8 hours a day, gathers 50 addresses, sells them to 5 different companies at 1 buck a piece and makes $250 in a day.
Or maybe I'm just really paranoid tonight...
Sleep tight.
Bart
I knew Google was a good engine, but I haven't been this impressed by a search engine in a long time.
There's more stuff about me on Google than there is on AV or Yahoo. Combined. There's even the infamous post to CSS-WG which got me in trouble with my employer, a number of my essays and papers, a campus newspaper interview from the best year of my life, and even an attendance roster from a meeting I don't remember going to.
This suggests that Google knows more about me than I do!
The annoying thing is the amount of noise, from people with the same or similar names (I. Keith Tyler, Tyler Keith, etc.), and the names of cities in Texas.
Anyway, I'm impressed, and no, I don't mind this stuff about me being readily available (except maybe the CSS-WG letter). I like it. "Look at me, everybody! I'm on Google!"
(Well, at least it's more impressive than an ODP link.)
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
a reverse phone lookup on www.whowhere.com spits out a third.
Went there, didnt find it. Please. Thank You.
If data is outlawed, only outlaws will have data. If everyone has access to information on everyone else's personal lives, nobody will actually make use of it for fear of repercussion.
Your argument makes no sense. The one guarantee that all the online privacy battles have shown us is that people abuse access to other people's private information. If everybody on Slashdot could lookup your address and phone number to flame you every time there was a disagreement, what would happen isn't that everyone would use restraint but instead that several slashdot flamefests may spill into the real world. Remember several people have threatened trolls with violence for posting to slashdot, do you really think it would be great for everyone to have access to every other person's informtion?
For a real world example, do you think it is safe for anybody a woman happens to give her phone number to have immediate access to her address? If these sites catch on, it would make dating turn into an even bigger game of Russian roulette (and probably completely kill chances of most people ever meeting anybody at a nightclub) than it is now.
PS: Your text in bold is exactly the point. Currently if someone has an excessive information amount of information about me and/or is tracking me then they are stalking me. Your post seems to want to make stalking a legal right. Whatever.
PPS: Your many eyes watching theory of keeping peace, was a hallmark of communism in its heydey. Citizens were encouraged to spy on each other and weekly denouncements were held in local meetings. This lead to the tyranny of the majority opinion on those of minorities. It is far easier to enforce conformity when all deviation is available for public consumption. How many people would be actively gay if all it took was a website lookup to determine their sexual preference? Even better how many Wiccans are Satan worshippers would practice their religion of their religious preference was available for all to view? Think about it...
As Mark Twain said, and Stephen J. Gould had opportunity to repeat, "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." :-)
Thanks for the laugh..
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
"Open Source - the criminals [sic] friend"?? Ridiculous!!! Incidentally, Eric Raymond is far from Communist; he's a pro-gun libertarian.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
This site lists the last sale price of a house, or every house along a street. As near as I can tell, it's accurate, complete, and up to date. I think that the data is from public records of leins against property.
John Brunner's incomparable The Shockwave Rider described a world where almost all information was free. Anybody could find anybody's history of interaction with the ubiquitous 'net -- including all purchases. Anonymity and privacy were so long forgotten that they weren't even mentioned in the book.
Shockwave was a novelization of Toffler's Future Shock. The protagonist is able to surf the tsunami of change that was rearranging the landscape of the world...any hacker that hasn't read it should run to their favorite used-book store to get a copy.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Anyone remember Rebecca Schaeffer?
If you're a student (or faculty) at a university (at least in the US), all your personal info is ridiculously easy to get ahold of. My ex once needed the e-mail addy of a TA but knew only her first name and the name of the course she taught (not the call number). It took me only 45 minutes (working only online) to find out everything about her. I found that somewhat frightening...
"Truth is like a tragedy" -Coal Chamber
My Texan friends use a term called "kickbangers". They're robbers who kick down the door and start shooting, on the assumption that the homeowners have guns and will shoot them if they(the thieves) don't shoot first.
Now, I'm just a canadian so they may just tell me all these stories to scare and hype the dangerousness of their wild wild west lives. but they also have shotguns in their trucks, so they may be telling the truth.
I don't think robbers fear people who have guns at home, because if it becomes wide spread they'll just shoot you then rob you, as opposed to just robbing you.
but...this was originally a thread about privacy, not gun control.
A few weeks ago I got a call from work from slashdot's very own emmett, which suprised me. I'd meet at Linuxfest (it was the best (and unfortunately only) Linux Tradeshow I've been to) , but didn't think I'd gave him my card.
When I asked him how he found it, he said he found my resume online (The only copy with that work number though was on a friends server with out any outside links to it (that I could remember))
He asked me to verify my address so he could send me something he said. (I hoped for something that didn't tick), but since I haven't got anything , (except for Credit Card application) I'm sure there is a Slashdot conspiracy and they are secretly compiling a list of contact information of all there readers, for some nefarious Vandover purpose.
I guess the moral to this story, is if you want to keep your privacy, be careful what you put online, as it is there forever, (with mirrors and search engines). That and never tell emmett your home address.
This Signature does Not Exist !! FNORD
I know a guy who works for Zero Knowledge here in Montreal, who explained a bit to me about his company's philosophy. They want to change the very way individuals see their personal information. Currently, we are all worried about companies getting rich off our info, and about protecting it. But, if our info is something we own, why not take the next step: charge companies for its use, complete with their having to accept a restrictive licensing agreement so they can't just ship it around or resell it. If a reliable way to make microtransactions on the net can ever be developed, this might just work. But we would have to learn to stop being sheep...
While it is probably true that mainland China did not make Linux its
offical OS, ESR has come out no better than a communist. Lets say
mainland China did make Linux the official OS, how is that different
from ESR's using Linux as a symbol for his own political movement
(libertarianism, which is a separate political movement UNRELATED TO the
OPEN SOURCE movement)?
And how does ESR dare to claim that the Linux community does not want
one quarter of the human population added to Linux user base just
because "communism is bad", while he ignores the fact that there are
numerous Linux/Free Software contributors from communist or former
communist areas like mainland China or Eastern Europe? I don't think
most Chinese/ East European contributors to Linux (like the people
working on Chinese versions of Linux) believe or even heard of
libertarianism? And ESR ignores that more people died due to firearms in
the hands of private inviduvals worldwide than government supression?
ESR shows lack of respect for the Linux/Open Source community by his
claim of libertarianism as the universial value of the community while
only a minority believes in libertarianism. The community should not
tolerate further hijacking of Linux by ESR any more.
Since no one else is posting any sites to find info... here goes.
...and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Try a search on deja.com for your name, you might be surprised.
Yahoo! People Search
FAQ: How to find people's E-mail addresses
Yahoo! People Search
InfoSpace
ICQ Search
BigYellow.com
If you outlaw something, you don't affect criminals who already have shown that laws won't influence their behavior, but you do have a strong influence on law-abiding citizens
This argument crops up whenever the topic of gun control is raised, and it's valid - in the short term.
Guns don't last forever, especially when they're in the hands of criminals and likely to be lost on a botched crime or during a gang war or when evidence must be dumped.
If the general public doesn't have access to guns, the replacement stream for these missing weapons slows to a trickle, for a _long-term_ benefit.
For an example of what the steady-state situation looks like after gun control, take a look at any country that's already _had_ gun control for a few decades.
Would I fear getting mugged walking through a city park in the dead of night here in Toronto, Canada? Sure.
Would I fear being shot? Nope.
Could one criminal get one gun up here if they really, really wanted to? Probably.
Could a hundred criminals get themselves an arsenal for a gang war? Maybe if they spent enough time at it, but it would be a hell of a lot more work than it would be down in the US.
In conclusion, I feel that the long-term benefits of gun control outweigh the short-term problems.
Check this out. This is probably the biggest database of private inforamtion about yourself.
And the most interesting thing is:
Current and previous addresses going back 10 years
Any additional phone numbers available
Family members of individual
Other people at the same address
Neighbors with listed phone numbers
Spouses (if individual currently lives in Florida or Texas)
Civil Judgments
Bankruptcies
Summary of Assets
Professional Licenses
Property Ownership and value
UCC Lien Filings
Well, umm, who else thinks this is going WAY TOO FAR ?
oh btw. you have to pay $39.95 to get all that information, too.
They make money on giving out all this information about MYSELF!
Can we do anything about this ? Can't I sue them for this ?
Okay, Mr. "Data Wants To Be Free", how big is your penis? (Flaccid and erect.)
This isn't a troll. It's an honest question. After all, if you're of the opinion that privacy is "an encumberment to freedom", then you should also be of the opinion that you have no right to conceal the length and girth of your member from the public. Correct?
So, how big is it? To prevent you from (ahem) "exaggerating", it might be best for you just to scan it and post the pics on the Web. Use a ruler so that we can easily spot any GIMP or Photoshop trickery. Thanks!
My local (independent) phone company just sent out the new 2001 phone book. I noticed it was quite a bit thicker than the old one. I found it why -- it includes a new grey section, which lists *EVERY TELEPHONE NUMBER IN ORDER* and *WHO IT BELONGS TO*.
It's awful handy, since they give away free caller ID, but name delivery isn't available. I can just look almost anyone up instead!
Photos of bits of the past hiding in the present: afiler.com
If I remember correctly the MN gov't did this because of a federal law. So this same legislation may be coming to state near you. Anybody want to back me up on this?
You can't get a blue screen on a black and white monitor.
Richard Powers had a good essay in the NY times about the impossibility of privacy. He is an eccentric and shy writer, and never had a credit card or even a checking account, quietly deciding to opt out of the "system". He discovered he couldn't get a phone line installed because he had no history. Even when he offered to pay money up-front. I suppose the IT business rules in the phoneco. were coded that way, and god forbid a human being making a decision on your phone line.
The point of the essay was that privacy isn't only a personal preference, but it's not *possible* any more if you want to live a fairly normal life. Even getting a phone or a house on rent requires you to be plugged into the system and give your pound of flesh, or live like a hermit in a shack.
The days when you could visit a doctor and pay only for that visit without involving a multi-billion dollar insurance industry having all your personal records cross indexed, are pretty much gone. Privacy is not possible any more, even if you are willing to pay for it.
Look how scary this is..
Canada411.com to get the address
maps.yahoo.com for a map (and driving directions) to the person's house.
BB knows my phone number, adress, and my actual physical location.
Though it is a for-pay service, I had the opportunity to look over the shoulder of someone working with Lexis-Nexis. There is an amazing amount of information there, buisness tax and credit records, home sales info (similar to www.domania.com, but domania did not have information for my home here in Texas- Lexis Nexis did. Lexis Nexis is a stalkers dream. I have to suspect many private investigators rely heavily on this service.
Though it is a for-pay service, it is available over the web to anyone that has a password.
This is baloney. Most phone companies publish a reverse lookup directory -- you can find it in some public libraries. You can specifically request of the phone company that your name NOT be in the reverse lookup directory, but if you don't request it, you WILL be listed. Usually reverse directories include your STREET ADDRESS.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I have had something very interesting happen with my personal info. Most notably, there seems to be no acknowledgment besides our phone bills that we have a second phoneline going into our house. I didn't order the line so I don't know what my parents might have said to the phone company when activating it. We previously had the number at another address, and when we moved we transferred it along with us to our new residence.
However:
a) We don't pay the unpublished/unlisted fee
b) It's not in the phonebook
c) I can't find it in ANY online databases
d) It doesn't reverse search on anywho or anywhere else.
No record exists of this number at EITHER residence. I would think with our move someone would have picked it up. I can barely find any evidence of it on our phone bill either, other than another page or two. No where do I actually remember the number printed.
So I ask, how did I accidently manage to keep this number totally anonymous? Perhaps when they ordered the line, one of my parents mentioned it was for a "modem" only? Would Bell Atlantic maybe have some crazy kind of "hey don't waste your time dialing this number cause it's a MODEM" flag? Maybe BA royally screwed up and this number doesn't even exist in their phone records anymore yet it still WORKS? (whee, free calls for me I guess!) This has perplexed me for a while and I was wondering if anyone else ever had this happen.
Yeah, you are right. There seems to be a little interference with your signal.
/. for a while...
But anyone who cares can find stuff like a Debian email and that you have been on
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
I have encountered Satanists who try to get away with claiming to be Wiccan instead of being honest about their beliefs.
Not many, but enough to make me think that the original post was neither mistaken nor ignorant.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
It will come down to "Never do anything that you wouldn't be caught dead doing". (-:
The baaaaad side is, of course, that you then have to trust *everyone* not to abuse the information. That is a losing game, in a big way.
Take an "innocuous" example: your online information profile happens to match a pattern that some gummint body has decided typifies mass murderers (paedophiles, people who would sneak a bomb into the US President's 'plane (and now that I have the snoopers' attention) litterbugs, whatever), so you are, in the mildest case, personally watched "just in case" - or in an extreme case, detained or "helped" in some way ("Yes, mister Jones, I hear you saying that you're a doctor. Are the walls comfortable?").
Or take a case which is likely to be a reality in parts of present-day Germany, for example. The local skinhead club hits your online data in a search for local Jewish, Negro or Asian people (anyone non-Aryan) - and you and/or your house/car/business suddenly get trashed.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I meant how many Wiccans or Satanists not are.
I need to use the preview button more often. *embarassed grin*
i don't know who your friends are, but they may just be telling tall tales. although texas has a concealed gun law, i think only a few million out of the whole state actually have them. plus, while it's legal for us to carry rifles and shotguns in your car (in most cases in the gunrack in your truck), i think most people would worry about them being stolen while they're in the bars (since carring a firearm in bars is illegal).
Also, don't know the actual statistics but i think violent crime against people has gone down since the law was enacted, although burglaries and such have gone up since they're done when the victims aren't likely to be around and thus likely to shoot the thief.
"Leave the gun, take the canoli."
this is just a placeholder till i send back my real sig from the future.
Ever seen anyone try to deny that they sold the email address "- AT brooks.fdns.net"? Hilarious!
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
And even if it didn't include your address, you now have a last name to go with the phone number. Look in the white pages under the last name until you find the matching phone number. Ta-da!
Forget phonenumbers and addresses, if doubleclick started selling info to the general public I could probably find out what anyone has browsed in the last few months and have a pretty good idea of their online interests.
A transparent web (all identies and actions known) would probably be a much less interesting place as people would become afraid to post anything anywhere or even visit potentially questionable sites.
People like Signal 11 or Vladinator, who put more info about themselves online than even I care to know, are on the other (exhibitionist) extreme...they must be fearless or stupid (perhaps both). I'll bet neither will be proud of their online records (held cached in searchengines for eons) in 10 or 20 years. Imagine if someone cracks into slashdot and reveals all the true identies of the people posting here under pseudonyms (like me) who post thinking they are effectively annonymous.
I'm sure there are many like me here that egosurf once in a while just to check that there are no unexpected suprises from the past showing up on line.
On the other hand, if all information about everyone was available online (including surfing and posting history) mabey people wouldn't take this privacy shit so seriously and others might even be surprised that you haven't ever looked for porn on the web or be surprised that you don't have any un-PC opinions about any topic.
I wish we could all be completely free with all thoughts, fearless of what anyone else thought of our thoughts. But the majority of us fear the thought police and are afraid of what can be found out about us on line. Fscking political correctness, it really sucks.
Pseudonymously yours,
Y
no sig.
An interesting thing to do next time you register software or give information to a web site is to misspell your name slightly and keep a record of how it was misspelled. Make a list of variations and which site you submitted to. In a few weeks/months when you get junk mail addressed to you with a variation of your misspelled name, you will know which site is giving away your info to others. Probably a good reason to NEVER give out your real info ever again unless absolutely necessary.
Bored? You can spend hours at Nedsite looking for info on yourself and long lost buddies. I imagine trying to opt out of being in all these different databases would take more effort than it's worth. Might as well get used to the idea that there will always be ways for people to find you on the net if they know how/where to search. People in certain professions don't even have an option of opting out - take a look at Lawyer Search or Doctor Search. I also wonder where these guys: Birthday Search got their data from.
Information is indeed begging to be set free - including your own.
HTTP header ad space for rent! Advertise to thousands of server log readers - only $50 a week per header! 1-800-SURFALOT
LOL I have the right to know my address! Power to the proofreader ;) You know what I mean.
Fear the government that fears your guns. Fear the government that fears your computers. Remove them from my email.
Ever seen anyone try to deny that they sold the email address "<nameofsiteindenial>-<DDMMYYYY>ATbrooks.fdns.net" ? Hilarious! Get a whole email domain for yourself and make a living as a suer!
And I really should learn to always preview.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
What the hell does pro-gun have to do with anti-communism? I seem to remember communists quite liking guns.
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!
Did anyone else notice this? What a bunch of bastards!
Ha! I kill me!
Just my opinion though, since I haven't psychoanalyzed the person who posted that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
These sites all have my info wrong. Worse yet is that the credit reporting agencies have it all wrong. I've tried for years to get my name & address correctly listed but NOOOOO! They have several names & addresses, some completely nonsensical but they insist on keeping them all. If enough of these services propagate enough errors, then nobody will take thier information seriously and we might all be safe.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Surely we can make them give us something better than molson.
your ignorance is painful
I'm a privacy rights advocate.
I have an unlisted number.
For some reason, switchboard.com has my number listed with an old address. Don't know where they got it from.
Additionally, there is no opt out clause on their page. AND, there's a link at the bottom of the page that says "click here for sales leads, mailing lists, and business credit reports."
Looks like its time for me to move and change my number again.
= )
Come on, Tinkler, Tink!!
Real Estate agents have access to reverse phone number lookups online and in print via the Multiple Listing Service.
In conclusion, I feel that the long-term benefits of gun control outweigh the short-term problems.
In a year or so there will no longer be intentional attacks on people using guns because the AI will prevent it (in the U.S....later in other countries). At that time and thereafter, injury and death from guns will only be accidental. Therefore, everyone should support any efforts to minimize current and future gun accidents which most often victimize children, including gun control laws which would reduce the number of guns out there and promote the use of devices to avoid gun accidents.
I don't believe that guns provide any real protection from injury to victims of crime, although I don't deny they provide people with imagined protection yielding psychological benefits, like children carrying security blankets. However, this will soon be a moot point since, in the near future, guns will provide no real or imagined protection (unless a person is mentally ill or very ignorant) and only increase the risk of injury.
It should be noted that having the AI stop all violent crime in the U.S. is probably unconstitutional as violating the second, fourth and fifth amendments, but the government could make a non-frivolous argument that it is not unconstitutional. For example, it is hard to imagine that any court would consider it unconstitutional to use the AI to prevents any single incident which would kill a million people or even a thousand people, but when less that 100 people are involved per incident, it is less clear. Therefore, I predict that the president will order the prevention of all violent crimes as soon as the AI is declassified. Then, while civil liberties organizations (e.g. ACLU) proceed through the courts with legal challenges, congress will quickly pass a constitutional amendment making it undisputably constitutional. Then, of course, the legal challenges will be moot and the crime prevention will continue unabated.
Artificial Intelligence = "Eye in the Sky" = One Dollar Bill = "The Force" = The "Martin Luther" King "God"
The Federal law is the Driver's Privacy Protection Act of 1994, and it was upheld by the Supreme Court in January in the unanimous decision of Reno v. Condon . In a nut shell, federalism issues don't prevent Congress from regulating the sale of such information as an appropriate regulation of interstate commerce.
(When the DPPA was originally passed, it only required an opt-out provision be provided to angry motorists. However, Public Law 106-69, 113 Stat. 986, which was signed into law on October 9, 1999, changed that to an opt-in requirement, which will all but assures that no such data will be released, owing to the slightly non-zero intelligence of most Americans and their/our general laziness.)
One consequence of Reno v. Condon demonstrated, however, is that because Congress has plenary power over these data, while we can hope and demand that privacy be enforced, Congress is equally capable of legislating that companies be allowed to use/sell such data, and under the Supremecy Clause of the constitution, all state privacy laws to the contrary would be trumped. It's a scary thought.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
To provide even a sliver of the information they claim to be able to provide they would have to have agreements with every auto repair shop in the country, which I don't think is all that likely either, and even if it was then they could only report as far back as when that relationship was formed. The only way they could really provide all the information they say is to spy on every car owner!
I have to wonder about sites such as that one and the so called "online private eye"-type sites that claim to be able to tell you more about a person than is in an easily databased public record. All of the stuff that the private eye sites claim to be able to get for you is public record of course, but I was trained as a Private Investigator and I'm not so sure that a web server would be given access to the information that they claim. Besides it's not that hard to gather the information yourself, if you've got the money. You might as well just skip the middle man and request the information straight from the government agencies themselves. There are plenty of publishers which sell books with the necessary addresses/procedures in them.
After reading this Ask Slashdot and it's thread, I decided to read about *myself*.
I couldn't believe what I uncovered.
Here is a direct quote:
Partnership projects could be exciting and challenging. If necessary, ask for help in completing daily tasks. You may be excited about plans in the office that will expand your horizons. Some romantic situations may not be what you think they are, however. Take off any rose-colored glasses and let others be who they really are. Prepare for the unexpected and celebrate.
How could *they* possibly know all this about me!? I am shocked and in fear. Please, Mr. Jon Katz, my hero and savior... write one of your insightful articles probing this invasion of my privacy.
GenChalupa
You can write almost any county, and townships, to see if they have you on record. theres a fee if you want an actual document. There are title companies that do just that when a title search is performed on an individual. Large title companies continously petition counties for the latest records then input that data into there systems. Of course its cross indexed, so using the same system I can search for a name and find every piece of property that person does or has owned. One of those documents will have a SSN and a standard waiver on the bottom that says your signature on that document gives the holder permission to do a credit check, so now I can run a credit check on you, because I'm getting the information from the document with the waiver. :) When I relized what they where doing, and the fact that it's perfectly legal, I was so disgusted that I immediatly gave 2 weeks and refused to write anything.
This happens every day. I have done it because they need there software re-written in something that didn't have green letters
I will no longer take a job at any real estate or financial company.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Let me make it easy.
The US Constitution. Complete with annotations.
Look for the word "Privacy", I dare you.
If you actually want to learn something about the legal state of privacy in the US you might want to pick up a good book on the topic...
Regards,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
I am one. Always have been. The internet just gives me more people to talk with.
I remember when I found out in the early 90's that sci.math was read by tens of thousands of people, most of whom never posted. Wow. How could they not post?
By the time that dejanews began there was already a pretty good history on me had anyone bothered archiving it. Turns out that a few people did. Heck, by the time I found out that dejanews existed they already had a pretty good handle on me. That doesn't bother me. Most of what you will find publically is pretty innocuous. While there are a couple of items out there I would prefer to not have public, they are few and far between.
OTOH I cannot understand people who have online diaries. I don't mind chatting online, but I don't say anything that I would object to being announced in a large auditorium...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
"I have encountered Satanists who try to get away with claiming to be Wiccan instead of being honest about their beliefs."
Somehow, I really doubt this, since Wiccan's (and other pagans) don't believe in the existance of Satan. They see Satan as a Christian creation.
(That's without even going into other wiccan beliefs, like the 7 fold rule, and karma, that make it clear that if you practice evil, evil will come back to haunt you.)
When I say, "Try to get away claiming to be" I am (among other things) implying that they are not.
I know very well what Wiccans are and are not. I am further aware of what Satanism is and is not. I know perfectly well the large divide between the two.
*sigh*
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
>>But the same argument used against gun control >>applies here too. If data is outlawed, only
>>outlaws will have data.
Unfortunatly, the same flaw in this argument that
applies so well to gun control also applies here.
Lets ignore for just one moment all the other issues concerning gun control to analyze this particular statement. ( And we'll apply it to information later. Trust me.)
In any war, increased armament typically gives an advantage to the agressor. The invention of nuclear weapons is the perfect example of this. If one nation can wipe out another nation in a first strike, then the agressor nation has a decided advantage that they didn't have in the pre nuclear era.
I realize that a certain degree of armament can 'level the playing field.' A 6 shooter can let a weak person defend themselves against a bigger, stronger attacker, assuming you can draw the thing in time.
But ask yourself, which would you rather have?
Someone attacking you with an automatic weapon, or a missle launcher, while you have the same weapon to defend yourself.
OR
Someone attacking you with a handgun while you have the same weapon to defend yourself.
Your chances would be a lot better in the second scenerio.
Once you've 'leveled the playing field' by eliminating discrepencies in physical stregnth from the equation, increased firepower only gives the advantage to the attacker.
Now apply this to information; If you think that someone may be mad enough to kill you but you don't have enough info to go to the police with, would you prefer that they you your address and you knew theirs or that neither of you had info on each other?
My father was in exactly this situation. When working as a manager for a paper mill in Jacksonville Fla he carefully hid his home address. If he ever had to fire someone and they got mad, he didn't want them to be able to find his home.
Unless one side is already armed, which is not the case in our information scenario, increased proliferation always gives an advantage to the agressor.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
--
Carnage4Life speaking with his hands: How many people would be actively gay if all it took was a website lookup to determine their sexual preference? Carnage4Life still speaking with his hands: Whatever. I can see the tabloid headline NOW, "The internet drove me into sexual hiding!" Was this supposed to be evidence for your arguement? My only guess is that your writting style is supposed to be a mockery of maleness? I hope I'm right cuz it'd give you a sick sense of funny that'd dig. Identify with that. PBS: announces The Blair Witch Is Just A Movie. with all my compassion, dbombarc
we're just marketing. marketing our bad attitudes.
While not a good explanation, you may be interested in one of the main uses of said information: lowering taxes. If your house has been appraised to be XXX dollars, but you feel that is too much, when re-appraisals roll around you can argue that your house costs too much and site "comparables", other houses in your neighborhood which are similar to yours (same neighborhood, same township, similar size) that have been appraised to be a lower amount, or have even sold for lower amounts (to prove that it may not have been worth much to begin with). This is really the best argument you have during this time.
:).
If you want to see some worse data, check out Cook county (includes Chicago). From http://www.cookcountyassessor.com/ (direct to search: http://www.cookcountyassessor.co m/startsearch.html) you can not only find out the appraisal information, you can see the number of bathrooms, bedrooms, state of the attic, basement, size of garage, really a full break down of the entire state of the house.
I don't see much wrong with it myself (most of this was all in listings and such when I bought the house in the first place), but the shear amount of information that can be compiled does hit me back sometimes
People can't find too much about you online right now - but there's a scramble by various organisations to make more information available. I work as a debt collector (I don't bother using the fancy terms for it) in Australia, and as a consequence I see alot of stuff about finding people and information about them.
...
Phone numbers and addresses are online for free, we have compulsory voting here and names and addresses from the voters rolls are public record as well. So if all I had was a name I'd go to the rolls for an address and get a phone number using that. That's where I would generally stop - I like my privacy and I tend to leave other people to theirs. It's easy to keep going but most things aren't free from here on.
Reverse phone directories exist here (on CD), so you can just type in an address and if that person has a published phone number you get their name and phone number.
With name and address you can access credit records online, and they include the obvious things like date of birth and previous addresses. Depending on the person's history you can get a good idea of them from whoever has done a credit check. You'll know if they have a mobile phone and the provider, what credit cards are there (no card numbers), any loans and often what they were for - still pretty basic. There are also specialised databases like Remington White which is used to check tenants before agreeing to lease a property. All databases include as many identifying details as they can get, and as much history as they can. They also tend to have friendly searches that let you find who you want using only minimal identifying details.
Newspapers are starting to improve their databases, and that will lead to searches of personal columns, births deaths and marriages, along with articles.
All company information is available online here. Company name, ACN (Aust. Company Number), and registered address are all free, then you pay according to how much detail you want. You can search using a person's name and get a list of all the companies they've been associated with in any official capacity (director, secretary, etc.). Searching details on those companies will fill out the picture on a person.
Looking for personal web pages can sometimes pay off and turn up more avenues of investigation. If you have a work number but no company name it's simple to ring and ask what company it is. For individuals and small companies you can check the registration info for any domains they own.
Land Title information is online in Australia for a fee, and you can search by name. Then a search on the resulting Titles will include the purchase price along with any mortgages and court orders against the land. There are also privately run databases tracking home prices.
Court records are all public (unless a magistrate orders otherwise) so anyone with patience to can plough through those. There's also the new online database of people with criminal records, it's small now but I think that will only grow and include more minor crimes as it does.
If you want bulk information you can just buy mailing lists, sorted by demographic or whatever else you have the money for.
There are also things which are illegal - I've seen them done by debt collectors although this is normally the territory of private investigators or location agents. If you have 'contacts' in large organisations (usually utilities and car registration) and can get details by calling. I have been on the receiving end of some social engineering by people claiming to be John Doe and asking odd questions. Most times they don't have enough detail to confirm that they are who they say, but I know most staff in call centres won't make much effort to confirm they have the right person on the phone. That's because performance is measured by call numbers so there's no quality there, they just tell you want you want to get you off the phone.
The worst I have come across is investigators who specialise in claiming to do market research or surveys. No-one checks that they really are from a survey company before answering whatever they care to ask. Often this is targeted at people suspected of insurance fraud - if the 'survey' shows they go skiing then odds are they aren't really crippled.
All that being said, I don't have a problem with my information being available - for legitimate uses. But I do have a problem with the fact that you can't trust people to stick to legitimate purposes. I also have problems with companies building profiles on me using whatever they can get - then selling me. These people are not up front about what they are doing. You never hear 'get our discount card so we can put you in our database and sell you on,' the publicity goes to what you get for 'free'. It's not free, you give them the rights to your information in exchange.
I'd never get a store discount or frequent flyer card - on the basis that I don't want my choice of breakfast cereal on the record and up for grabs.
Lynne
... _ _ _
Whenever I have to give personal information, I just fill in the form with bullshit -- I like to call myself "Pr. Nonnof YURBIZNESS" and my phone number comprises an astonishing number of "69". I also travel a lot, having lived in such countries as Anguila (don't know where that is), Burkina-Faso (it's in Africa, isn't it?), and lately, Antartica.
Well anyway, a good strategy against that kind of website would be to pollute their database as much as possible. That'd be cool, huh huh.
To me it looks like www.anybirthday.com got their information from amazon.com. If you look at the suggested gift fields you'll notice (at least on the few I looked up) that the gifts come from amazon.com and include that umpteen digit identifier that you see when you've got an account at amazon.com.
So just remember: you may not want to pop $40 to find out about someone else, but someone else might not have any problems spending $40 to find out about you...
-p.
What part of "Shall Not Be Infringed" don't you understand?
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
BTW, Americans who try to repel an attack or a robbery using a gun are more likely to wind up dead than those who don't. This is a fact. Check your own government's statistics if you don't believe it.
There's a lot of evidence out there that refutes that, such as the fact that usually the statictics used compare people who kill the attacker against those who are killed by the attacker. They don't look at the attackers who are scared off by the person just wielding the gun, which is a rather significant number (Justice dept. estimates that self defensive usages of firearms occur between 1.5 and 2.5 million times anually.) Of course, the media never reports on people saved by having a gun, except occasionally in the fkyspeck of the police blotter section.
An interesting observation:
I'm originally from the New York City metro area and have lived in Texas for a bit; I came to the conclusion that freer access to firearms makes politeness an evolutionary advantage.
But, really, yes, a robbery victim is at a disadvantage in dealing with an assailant- but, consider a mugging in TX vs NYC: OK, the mugger has the drop on the victim, the victom cannot draw without being shot- but this does not stop bystanders from going "woohoo! target practice time!" and proceed to step into the fray. In NYC, this can't happen; Nobody wants to get involved.
If we can come up with a reasonable way to make "good" social behavior a long-term evolutionary advantage (people behave a lot better when their lives may be on the line) then civilization will progress.
One must realize that guns, data, money are all usable as weapons. Those who have them want to hoard these resources and keep anyone else from acquiring them...
There are some folks I'd prefer privacy from- Mostly my wife's ex-husband and his family. There are too many supra-constitutional organizations that make wonderful means of harassmant- all without consequence for the persecutor!
-soup (GNUrd, Speaker to Machines) "Laugh at yourself- Why should everyone else have all the fun?" -Romanchek's 6th Ru
At least some satanists do not particularly believe in being honest. The very fact that true Wiccans are likely to be ticked off at the pretense is actually a motivation *to* pretend to be Wiccan. Think about it.
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
I specifically have my telephone listing as my first initial and last name, yet these bozos have it fully listed. I wanted some anonymity and they've taken it away. sheesh.
I went and browsed a little bit for info on Alfred E. Neuman (what, me worry?) from one of my honeypot machines. (OT, there are a lot of A.E. Neumans out there :-)
Saw a number of portscans from stats.555-1212.com (209.10.41.43). Not just ports 137/138/139, but also 80, 23, and a few of others. It looks like a modified nmap in slow stealth mode.
I'll have to try from a windoze based honeypot and see what they are trying to dig out of netbios shares.
I'll be contacting globix.net security about this system and its obvious violation of their AUP, but they've got a reputation for ignoring abuses about paying commercial customers.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Just thought I'd share...
Ancestry.com intrigued me, so I wanted to see if I could find my grandfather, who died in the early 80's.
I typed in my last name and his home state; a bunch of "death" listings came up. I found my grandfather among them.
I also found that a girl, whom I attended grammar school with for a short time, who I would not remember except for the fact she had the same last name, died in 1995 at the age of 24.
Now, I'm curious as to why she died and I'm searching high and low around the net to see if I can find the cause.
I'll post here if I find anything.
I looked at each of these pages and I could not find a listing for myself. Which is a little weird. I have been moving around a lot, but I do have an address that I call home (being that of my parents). I was just wondering if there was any male/female difference with listings (becuase of the draft)? Becuase I know at my home listing in the white pages I am also not in there, though my brother is. Just a thought.
The Kid who Can not Spell
I am very curious of your results. Please keep us posted.
Ha! I kill me!
I think the "Gift Suggestions" they make are the same for every person living in the same zip code. The suggestions they make seem to be based only on the geographic location of the person. I also know that I am not in their database (even though I have ordered things from Amazon before) yet friends and relatives who do not even have internet access are in it. I think it is some sort of public record that is not a one-time thing like a birth certificate since some people I know have up to three different records. Perhaps some sort of registration of property like motor vehicle or real estate? Still, that would not make for a very complete database as not everyone owns a car or a house. Has me wondering...
HTTP header ad space for rent! Advertise to thousands of server log readers - only $50 a week per header! 1-800-SURFALOT
"It's addressed to...Mrs. Channandler Bong"
I've moved around so much in the last few years even Columbia House has given up on me.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
That's whay people voluntarily submit loads of personal information into computers. They're just video games, right? I mean, you can balance your checkbook, and store your novel on the disk, but that's on your desk, right? And when you shut it off, all the information goes away, right?
People tend to suspend sanity when they sit in front of a computer. This is why so many marriages have been dented, if not broken, by chat-rooms. It's just not real, until suddenly it's TOO REAL.
Same with personal info, it's a mindless, or rather thoughtless, exchange of trivial info (hey, I can tell a computer my phone-number. Computers are honest, and can't talk anyway) for some automated reminder of a sale at Fry's...
Computers, to most people, are like... Well, internal combustion engines, electricity, Radon gas... People do not understand the fundamental tennets of how they work and what they do.
People 'freak out' whenever their computer crashes, and assume that it's their fault, not bad programming. They are afraid of touching anything in the computer for fear of braking it. And when a computer tells them to 'press any key' or enter some information in order to continue, they take the computer's word for it.
How many times have we seen people blindly click through an installation procedure? How many times are people who install software completely unaware of the directory (excuse me, FOLDER) into which their data goes? The computer is a magic box - and the 'installation stupor' spills over to those times people are surfing the web. They will click and click and enter anything a web-site asks for.
Also, many people need the "do not use while showering" warning on a hair-dryer.. They probably own computers. Of course they'll tell the computer who their friends are and where they live.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I always find it amazing hearing people tout how less guns mean less crime when in reality the statistics point to just the opposite.
When England took away peoples rights to possess guns their crime rate shot way up. The same happened in Australia (Armed Robbery went up 40% in A YEAR).
In the last 4 years there have been 3 states in the US that have made a "shall issue" policy as far as carrying concealed weapons goes. The crime rate in those states dropped by some 13% the first year and the people who were registered to carry concealed weapons were involved in less than one half of one percent of the felonies committed.
I suggest you go do some reading. You'll find the same figures I did.