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Comment by rt4mn | Hacker News Reader

> Well, guess what? We have now all been granted a power once reserved for totalitarian governments. A not particularly industrious fourteen-year-old can learn more about a person in a shorter amount of time than a team of K.G.B. agents could have done sixty years ago.

I feel like this is an aspect of privacy that is not discussed often enough. Its a discussion that should have happened in (the year) 1984 when the terminator came out, and Arnold killed a bunch of people by looking them up in the yellow pages. Everyone having increasingly easy access to the tools necessary to perform these kinds of "OSINT investigations" into nearly anybody is not good for society.

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> I feel like this is an aspect of privacy that is not discussed often enough. Its a discussion that should have happened in (the year) 1984

Not 84, but Brin wrote about it in 1996 in Transparent Society. I find his take on it naive, was the first solid discussion outside academia and is worth read8ng.

Agre wrote about this quite a bit in the 80s.

Brin's book is one of my favorites.

It does seem a little naive in retrospect, but a world where people would be willing to pay a modest amount in a competitive market for pseudonymity, and would trust banks to provide it, sure seems like a better world than the world we live in.

My missus started a new job recently, she was curious about her boss and it took me about 5 minutes to find his address and house on google maps.

That's sodding terrifying.

5 minutes, huh?

In the 90s, I found a bosses address in the yellow pages in seconds, then called him at home on a Sunday, to chat the end of a football game.

Now I hate my boss and love random folks online.

Weird.

Was trying to find a friends address to send them a surprise gift. It was weird how easy it was.

Have you seen these websites which bring up everything that was available in the past about someone? Past names and emails on Facebook, photos and geolocation of the EXIF data on a map… Purely by tracking Tweets and Facebook posts and keeping history.

truthfinder.com is one I've used. It's a paid service, and it presents like a scammy site at first glance, but it's legit. Lookup your own name to prove it to yourself. It has information about my past that even I forgot about.

What's especially disconcerting is how fast your physical address leaks out. Within a couple of months moving to a new rental, they have my address down to the apartment number even though I never publish that publicly anywhere. I assume they ingest large data breaches.

We really need a kind of DNS for physical addresses. Abstract your physical address behind an fixed virtual one and only allow authorized parties to resolve the address. This would also be hugely helpful for people that move around a lot, since you'd never have to update your mailing address with any vendor ever again.

Ooh I had the DNS idea for addresses a few years ago… I would love for that to exist! Updating addresses is such a pain in the ass.

Snail mail forwarding services exist... but a lot of companies won't mail stuff to them.

If you know roughly what area someone lives in, county auditor websites have a lot of information.

Similar, companies house in the UK, I looked him up to see what directorships he held then I looked those companies up, one was registered from his home address and done.

Not to someone living and working in a small town.

> is not good for society.

Heh, maybe society can shed the fan star dynamic, and it will all be okay.

By the way, Anonymous wrote some pretty good poems back in the day; surveillance doesn't always come with fame.

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