A friend of mine moved to a new neighborhood. Apparently, her neighbor was in the police. She said she was out walking her dog and the neighbor greeted her with her first name and middle name when she had barely moved in. We didn't know her legal middle name was different from what we called her. So we pretty much know he looked her up (driving licence info?) and he wants her to know he looked her up.
Why? Who knows but he did.
We should have a right to security in our information, and privacy of it from meddlers and nefarious actors like the aformentioned neighbor. Sadly, many of my fellow Americans are all to happy to claim they have nothing to hide, despite how much that attitude continues to hurt them.
I'm not disagreeing with this, but I don't think we can trust people to make a system that, e.g., automatically collects and stores the locations of all cars with plates visible to all the roving police cars -- and then not use that information improperly.
I'm hoping that we'll gradually choose deliberate ignorance of certain things we could know because although the knowledge could be helpful in certain cases, it's also too dangerous.
If she had been an owner, the information would be available to the public, and not even all that odd for a neighbor to look up (I look up sales records for houses that sell in my neighborhood to see what they sold for, for example, to get an idea of how the market is).
Maybe he just saw a piece of her mail.
Edit: also, the most obvious question: why didn’t she do the normal thing and ask “hey, how do you know my name?”