Comment by sbov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sbov | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure if many people have experienced losing the "practical obscurity" this article talks about firsthand. Property records are public. So are WHOIS records. But it's unrealistic to manually search all the property records, phone books, WHOIS records to find someone you're looking for. However, some websites index these, and some search engines index those sites. I've had people contact me that I would prefer couldn't find me because my information was searchable due to a WHOIS record.

There are people out there slurping up all the information they can find in the public and attempting to connect it together. If you want to see what I mean, go check out your mylife.com profile. Mine has a big red warning because I have neighbors with court records. It says I "may" have sex offenses. What the actual fuck? This company needs to eat shit.

This isn't about people tracking you to give you better ads. Its about people tracking you to sell information to whoever wants to pay them. Its way fucking worse.

I think that website might have a goal of making money from people paying to remove the bad content. I've seen this for arrest record sites. If they can get high SEO for your name it could affect job/interviews, especially low level stuff.

I didn't know about this site, but checking myself out with it, its information is remarkably incorrect. Maybe that means I'm doing a good job of being a hermit? It claims I'm Christian (I was born into a Lutheran family, so that's an understandable mistake), am married (ha!) and maintain relationships with many people (ha), proceeding to list 5 people I've never heard of[0]. Salary is wrong, home value is wrong, and the only email address it lists is about 20 years out of date. Really no better than the other various people search pages I've seen, which also failed to impress. Hell it even does the fake "we're looking up all this full report information for you... please pay at the next window" thing that they do. If this were the best the corps could track me I would say we have nothing to worry about, but I doubt it is.

[0] Turns out they're my neighbors.

Do you not speak to your neighbors!?

Sounds similar to Zillow lowering homes' estimated values (zestimates) to encourage subscriptions with which you can contest their number.

> check out your mylife.com profile

This can be entertaining. Much of my information is incorrect or pending. My sister's information is almost entirely wrong and does not note she has been dead for several years. It also says she "may" have sex offenses. My father's first and last name are correct, as is the age he was when he died. On the other hand, the date of his death is more than 20 years off and everyone "related" to him is wrong, other than myself.

> go check out your mylife.com profile

mylife.com has been down for at least a week according to https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/mylife.com.html

It's very much up for me now.

Down for me... this is strange. Perhaps they're black holing European traffic at the IP level to avoid GDPR?

Hmm, I'm in GDPR-Europe (EU) too though.

I’m in Switzerland (which is not in EU), it doesn’t open.

And this is exactly what GDPR is meant to prevent. My registrar now provides free whois privacy, so people can't see what domains I own at a cursory glance. There are still a lot of (government) public records on me, but at least companies can no longer combine their own data with this and sell it to the highest bidder without my consent.

Yep. There I am. I put in an old address, and it found me at my current (new state). Job is way wrong. Relations are mostly correct with a few unrelated people.

But I didn't want to click. I'm paranoid about click-through. I just scrolled past. Nothing to see here. Who's this guy? Who cares... (>_<)

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