this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
143 points (93.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

36172 readers
899 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
143
Phonebooks (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by WoahWoah@lemmy.world to c/nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
 

I was talking to a coworker about these new phishing attacks that send your name and address and sometimes a picture of your house, and I was saying how creepy it is, and they told me that phonebooks were delivered to everyone and used to have like literally everyone in a city listed by last name with their phone number and address. Is that for real?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 21 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I have never felt so old.

Name, address, and phone number of the account holder used to be published in books that got sent to everyone in the city and also just left lying in boxes that had phones in them if you needed to make a call while you weren't home, because your phone used to be tied to a physical location.
You also used to have to pay extra to make calls to places far away because it used more phone circuits. And by "far away" I mean roughly 50 miles.

It's not the biggest thing in the world, privacy wise, since a surprising amount of information is considered public.
If you know an address, it's pretty much trivial to find the owners name, basic layout of the house, home value, previous owners, utility bill information, tax payments, and so on. I looked up my information and was able to pretty easily get the records for my house, showing I pay my bills on time, when I got my air conditioner replaced and who the contractor who did it was.

As an example, here's the property record for a parking structure owned by the state of Michigan. I chose a public building accessible by anyone and owned by a government to avoid randomly doxing someone, but it's really as easy as searching for public records for some county or city and you'll find something pretty fast.

[–] WoahWoah@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I use one of those services, Optery in my case. Do you think that's just a waste of money (honest question)? It definitely reduced my footprint for simple googling, but I've been wondering if it's really worth the cost.

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Honestly? It's not something I would pay for. Google has their own service where they'll let you know if they find your information and you can ask them to remove the search result.
Beyond that, there's some information that you just fundamentally can't make private and no service can get taken down.
Most data mining sites just collect those public records and put them next to each other, so they get a pile of your name, birthday, where you were born, how active you are as a voter and all that stuff.

Removing your address from Google maps just seems silly to me. That there is a residence there is fundamentally public information, not being on maps doesn't make it less public it just probably causes issues for delivery drivers.

Anyone who has your data and is going to be a jerk about it isn't going to listen to a request to take it down either. They're just going to send you spam messages.

The odds of being Targeted by a determined individual who's focused explicitly on you is low. They tend to target a broad swath of people, and then dig in on people who take the bait a few times.

[–] WoahWoah@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Hmm. Thanks for your response. It does it across across about 600 databases, and they have power of attorney to initiate the removals and follow up, etc.

I guess I just didn't like that it was so easy to just Google my name and then have my address. It did help with that, but maybe you're right that it's kind of pointless in the bigger sense. I guess I'm just trying to keep someone IRL that gets pissed at me for whatever reason from immediately knowing where I live. I feel like most people aren't going to work very hard at it.

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, and it's not like you want the information out there, it's just that in my opinion it's not something I would pay money for. Having the authority to make the request doesn't mean that the party on the other end is obligated to comply, or in some cases even legally permitted to.

I've used Google's service where they send you an email to review results if they find something, and my Google results for my incredibly distinctive name are basically only professional resources that I kinda want to be findable.

[–] WoahWoah@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Yeah that makes sense. Though, hopefully more states (or the fed) follow California, Connecticut, Colorado, and Virginia's lead in passing right to be deleted and stronger digital privacy laws.