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Comment by auiya | Hacker News Reader

Almost every city in the US has a GIS system which you can use to look up tax record ownership of property parcels. Sales history too even. This information is also available via FOIA requests. There's probably easy ways to scrape it out considering almost every city uses the same 2-3 GIS software systems. In the case of home ownership, the only choice you have for privacy is to register an LLC under a paid attorney as a proxy, and have the LLC buy the home. And even then you may run into issues trying to file for homestead exemption property taxes. You're not able to tell the city to unlist your property info in most cases.

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Reading the Letters to the Editor and similar features in older magazines and newspapers reveals something that would be unthinkable today: it was common for the home address of the person writing to the periodical to be published along with their letter. As far as I can tell, no one had a problem with this. When I was young, drivers licenses included your Social Security number and it was common to have it printed on your personal checks. This no longer happens.

Is it the information that's the problem or is the problem what others are willing to do with that information?

Knowing the address of three strangers isn't very valuable, and thus less likely to be abused. Knowing the address of millions of people can be very valuable, and thus very likely to be abused.

In cases like this the issue lies not in the specific datatypes, but the aggregation thereof.

This is an interesting insight.

I think most reactionary pro-privacy responses (the HN default perspective) really stem from a complicated internalization of data gathering/use capabilities that has been adjusted over time combined with a lizard brain feeling of invasiveness. Because almost always no one particularly gives a crap about YOU and your specific data, but they may profit from and misuse your information in passing or in aggregate.

It is a lot like the feeling of having your car broken into or house robbed. You feel personally violated but more than likely you are a victim of circumstance. It can be hard to distinguish between faceless identification for (ad network data gathering, for the most part) and the risks of general data availability that makes anyone as capable as an old P. I. (especially when data leaks conflate the two).

"almost always no one particularly gives a crap about YOU and your specific data"

It's really amazing how much time people spend these days trying to gather information on people, considering how useless it is. I don't mean mass surveillance, I mean like people that you want to do business with individually.

> In the case of home ownership, the only choice you have for privacy is to register an LLC under a paid attorney as a proxy, and have the LLC buy the home.

Note you can achieve a lot of this privacy benefit much more easily by transferring ownership of your house to a living trust (where your name isn't on the name of the trust). For companies that just scrape and correlate info (as opposed to doing a targeted search), that is good enough.

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