Slashdot Mirror
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."
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...
Did anyone else notice this? What a bunch of bastards!
Ha! I kill me!
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
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