Meh… If some data about me is listed on a website nobody ever sees, I don’t care what sound a tree falling in the wood makes.
This isn’t a binary issue. Removing data from Google will usually have 90 % of the effect of removing it everywhere.
This isn’t a binary issue. Removing data from Google will usually have 90 % of the effect of removing it everywhere.
I had to deal with a stalker at one point and found over 100 of such sites, it took me a few days to opt out of all of them (and some ignored my requests).
Data brokers are total scum.
Not to mention that this Google effort requires an explicit threat to be made on the page in question. They won't remove data broker pages, you have to contact each on individually and hope they'll actually fulfill your request.
The amount of hoops you need to jump through to protect your privacy / shield your address in the US is quite incredible. And if you don't do it correctly from the start (use an anonymous land trust, etc), you're hosed.
Privacy should be the default. People's home addresses shouldn't be public info
The U.S. has a decentralized land registration system. The downside is it usually cannot provide indefeasible title [1]. The upside is it's tremendously robust. That robustness comes, in part, from publicly-verifiable records.
> People's home addresses shouldn't be public info
Confidential property ownership has its own issues.
It's less stable. In the event of a dispute you only have the registrar's and disputing owners' records to consult. It's also associated with embezzlement, money laundering and tax fraud. (The set of societies where a public home address puts one at risk and the set that have problems with embezzlement and laundering overlap in their institutional weakness.)
(For tenants, on the other hand, there are fewer compelling reasons to publish residence.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrens_title#Indefeasibility_...
My post-lobotomy view of privacy is all my secrets are known to the people I hate the absolute most ("I hate them with perfect hatred // I call them mine enemies" PSALMS KJV), and while I thank them as enemies (Matthew KJV) I do not forgive them, the intention is someday they thank me in return, as the Christians they claim to be, for acting against them as an enemy.
So then, what is privacy? If you're lobotomized, privacy is divulgation. I cannot erase my lobotomist's memory, and I cannot recollect all my own selfsame memories, so instead I divulge, and divulging is privacy.
Understand this: privacy is about who knows what. Who do you want to know what? Some options are out of the question for me. After all, there is a condition right on the box of all cryptographic products, in this case especially 1Password which I used before, during, and after my lobotomy, which is this: cryptography is about forcing the government to torture you. Not just the government though! If you get tortured? Forget it! Warranty void!
Well so then what? Nobody asks, OK so I get tortured, THEN WHAT? ANSWER ME! And I think I'm supposed to not be able to see the answer, I've been conditioned to avert my attention to the answer, not see the ads for the answer like fucking literal pathological banner blindness. So many ads I wanted so badly to see, I just couldn't see. The most targeted advertising, missing completely. Like it's invisible to me, I read the statute in the Federal Codes about torture, how it was defined, and I simply couldn't read the lawyer's advertising with a phone number to call them.
So privacy? Before torture, divulging works against privacy. After torture, it works in its favor.