Maybe she doesn't want to be found and has a different life now and wants to live that life. Without people on the Internet obsessing.
We'll never know which it is if we don't ask. If she asks to be left alone, people should respect that but they shouldn't assume that.
As an example, I recommend the documentary Searching for Sugar Man.
Go look at virtually any female video game (staff, developer, etc) on Twitter and you'll immediately see numerous reasons based on the type of audience they get.
I don't think someone making a documentary about pioneers in any given subject -- in this case, women and female characters in early videogames -- would be engaging in "harassment and stalking" because he's trying to contact said pioneers who might still be alive. Now, if once contacted the subject said she didn't want to appear in the documentary, her wish must be respected. But without contacting her, how can the documentary maker know?
What part of the article in particular do you think puts "the bar really low"? I don't see it. It seems respectful and not at all intrusive, well within the subject matter and not including extraneous or irrelevant personal information.
I meant her involvement in the video industry does not justify such privacy invasion.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/slate-st...
[2] https://reason.com/2020/06/24/slate-star-codex-dox-scott-ale...
[3] https://arcdigital.media/slate-star-codex-and-the-gray-ladys...
Let's not go for the pitch forks so readily, shall we?
You exist in Experian, does that mean that automatically gives me the right to bother you and tell people online to bother you on socia lmedia?
None of this is opt in, all of it is extremely unwanted, and those companies really should not exist.
Disclaimer: I also work in gaming, and deal with streamer security.
I don't know how they match it in the backend, often it's wrong (and results in innocent parties being attacked).
I usually recommend completely prepaid lines for this to prevent hijackers from using the good old social engineering trick to hijack their accounts via customer service by providing last 4 of various identifiers. But these still eventually show up after you add the number to enough 'traditional' accounts. One of my friends (female, streamer) has gotten police at her house at 3 am with guns drawn so many times it's ridiculous. At least in many parts of, if not the entire US, trying to swat someone is legitimately trying to do your hardest to murder them.
This honestly should be made illegal, there is no reason for these services to exist, or for public records to be made available at all other than rate limited, in person without the ability to take a copy. Exceptions can be made for elected officials.
I checked and it appears they lack Canadian data; and so perhaps I was correct in presuming that such egregious breaching of personal privacy would be troublesome up here. Or maybe WP just doesn't have the data.
FWIW, there are cheap providers of SMS over SIP, now. I have a DID through voip.ms that can send and receive SMS, and it's cheap.
I understand the part where they would like to know a bit more about it, but sending pages and pages of physical letters, at least to me, I find this creepy and weird/obsessive
The people that are accusing me of trying to remove women or some 'damsel in distress' thing don't seem to understand that in the gaming space, people calling in threats or attempting to kill you in person because you made a disliked game balance change is real, applies to males, and is a baseline behaviour, or that females in gaming are subject to significantly worse harassment by orders of magnitude; look at the cesspool that is/was pokimanehot.
What does it take to be left alone? What does a person have to say/do for it to be taken as anything but an invitation to search for them?
On the contrary, it'd be hard not to have an extremely low profile with such a common name.
Add in the fact that it's been 40 years, and nobody has cared one single bit for the first 35 of those years.
Add in the fact that she probably didn't get any author credit for the game, so probably didn't even realize people knew her name.
Remember that the internet didn't exist in the eighties. I wrote a few video games in the 80s, and this is probably the first acknowledgement on the internet ever that the Bryan Larsen that wrote games for T&D software is this Bryan Larsen. And I'm much easier to find than most, since I'm the type of guy who uses my real name on forums like this.
I highly doubt anybody is going to care about my games, and I'm sure she never thought anybody would ever care either. She was wrong, but I'm sure I'm not.
I one time found the author of the book that got me interesting in programming as a kid back in the 80s, and after sending her a message on FB she was happy to find someone remembered it, let alone kept the book on their shelf as a memento.