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Comment by rockbruno | Hacker News Reader

One of the "pranks" we play on expats moving to Sweden is to look them up on hitta.se, take a screenshot and send it back to them saying "this you?". They always freak out and with reason, these sites contain an obscene amount of personal information about you. Some of them even give you people's salary history, which is slightly harder to obtain but also totally legal.

The weirdest thing I thought is that most Swedes don't think this is weird. Even if the country is overall safe I can think of a trillion ways in which you could ruin someone's life with this data.

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I don't understand how you don't revolt against this to be honest.

And in terms of 'safe', didn't the extreme right just win big because the mainstream parties totally ignore the uptick in organized violent crime? At least that's what they said in the news here, perhaps it's not fully accurate.

I understand state agencies might want to see personal data, though I often don't agree. Having it available for anyone to see certainly would not make me feel safer.

But anyway I will never live in Sweden anyway. If the Swedish are happy with this, so be it. I just find it hard to understand.

“At least that's what they said in the news here, perhaps it's not fully accurate.”

IMHO it’s pretty accurate unfortunately.

Based on my observations from having Swedish friends and spending time in Sweden, a lot of the rise of the extreme right there can be directly attributed to the tensions resulting from the Syrian refugee crisis.

The last time I was in Sweden, ordinary folks were expressing ideas like "well maybe not everyone deserves free healthcare".

Like many western nations, economic opportunities and quality of social services is dipping. Standard practice for right wing parties to blame immigrants (or refugees, etc.).

> Standard practice for right wing parties to blame immigrants (or refugees, etc.).

On the flip side, standard practice for left wing parties is to deny that immigration causes any problems at all and call you racist for even trying to discuss it. However, as we are seeing in Sweden, sometimes the problems become too big to ignore.

People aren't just "trying to discuss it". Plenty of outright racism in Sweden.

I do not deny that some who oppose lax immigration policies are racist, but just because some people who have certain concerns are racist does not mean that everyone who shares those concerns is also racist, or that those concerns are invalid.

Some people have in fact been trying to have discussions about immigration policies, but for quite a while proponents of lax immigration policies have dismissed any pushback against such policies as racist/xenophobic fear mongering.

To your point, rape statistics in Sweden seemed to be the major talking point on this issue, and would generally trigger the response you describe.

The statistic is unfortunately being hijacked for that purpose. It is especially common for foreign news outlets to focus on this and it gives the impression that Sweden is not a safe place for women. The opposite is true however, Sweden is one of the safest places and on earth for women.

>Like many western nations, economic opportunities and quality of social services is dipping. Standard practice for right wing parties to blame immigrants (or refugees, etc.).

Increasing the importation of poor immigrants that are dependent on economic assistance and social services by definition reduces the economic opportunity and availability of social services for the already poor residents who are dependent on these services. Those who insist on rejecting this piece of objective reality because it doesn't jive with their political and/or cultural agenda create a vacuum for the "right wing" to be the only ones voicing the legitimate concerns people have about mass immigration.

Organized violent crime is mostly gang wars so ordinary people aren't directly affected. Although you could have bad luck and be mistaken for one of these gang members I guess.

I don't agree. I was in the Netherlands when there were gang wars in Amsterdam and these guys don't care about collateral damage at all. One time they shot up a tram full of people during some gang fight.

What does the situation in the Netherlands have to do with Sweden?

It's the same problem - heavy organised crime fighting turf wars in crowded cities.

Also, ATM raids are getting much more violent. They blow up half the building just to get to the cash in the machine. I think it's normal that people ask for the authorities to do more against this.

Not true, identity theft is common in Sweden, many regular Svensson are suffering from frauds and even burglaries because of these policies.

Identity theft is not a violent crime.

The question is, out of those trillion ways, how many actually happened? This Swedish info is actually public since quite a while, and I have yet to hear of lives destroyed. I'm not saying it cannot be, just that I didn't hear.

This makes me wonder why ordinary people are not swatted, police called on them, deliveries made in their name, etc. in Sweden when a country that doesn't have such public records like USA has this so regularly several people have died.

Swatting works in USA because of how the police handle it. In Sweden, and in most of the world, you would get a knock on the door and some questions from two policemen. US police going in blind no-knock raids with weapons hot on the basis of a single anonymous phone call is the issue, not public addresses.

Does Sweden have something like CPS? In America, if someone discovers you have a child they can make repeated allegation to CPS. CPS is required to investigate and they're also required by law to not disclose who reported it. So having your name in a book with any evidence you have children allows anyone to harrass you endlessly, each time you'll be under investigation for weeks to months and you can never find out who's causing it.

Sweden has an its version of CPS. The first time they will do an investigation but without any proof, nothing will happen. After a few of these without any indication of harm being done to the child they will just ignore them as it has been investigated.

You can’t really cause problems for people this way.

And blaming swatting on swatters is an obvious trick. To prevent swatting, we have a choice of changing our expectations about how police should react to anonymous snitching, or we can detect and isolate or eliminate every single extremely maladjusted young man that has existed or will exist.

Choosing the first means that you end swatting as a danger. You're only ever pretending to choose the second (the impossible one); but instead you're actually saying that the status quo is fine and in addition you're going to use maladjusted young males as a pretense to take even more liberties with the amount of force and restriction that you're going to apply to the general public.

Swatting doesn't work in any other country than America because in any other country than America, the police won't immediately murder someone based on a phone call.

Swatting rarely results in murder in the US, and obviously it makes the news when it does. It's largely an effective harrassment, terrorization (fear) tactic. Congressperson Marjorie Greene (yes she's terrible, not the point) being an on-going example of that.

> Swatting rarely results in murder in the US, and obviously it makes the news when it does.

I don't think this is as much of a counter-argument as you seem to think.

> Swatting doesn't work in any other country than America because in any other country than America

A Twitch streamer was swatted in the UK [1].

[1] https://www.shacknews.com/article/131816/twitch-streamer-kef...

That's London in Canada.

> A Twitch streamer was swatted in the UK

It says "Canadian" in the headline and throughout the article. Still a country other than America, but not the UK.

But also the most similar country there is to the USA.

Stalking is ridiculously common everywhere and there's no reason to think it isn't in sweden as well. If no one you know has experienced it, or felt safe enough to confide in you, that still means nothing to everyone else. "What has soco heard about" is not a meaningful metric of anything.

> public since quite a while...

I think this is an interesting point. If you were to suddenly flip a switch and have all US data exposed the same way, I think there would be chaos and maybe even violence.

But I think that speaks more negatively to the current state of America than it does the idea of having information be public.

Can you describe why it will create violence? I could maybe understand that it could makes employment harder for some group or something, but how does it lead to violence.

Violence because some Americans just cannot be trusted with public data.

My biggest complaint about living in the US, being a natural born citizen, is that most people seem to make everything about themselves and this is partially the problem. All of this information being publicly available isn't the problem, it's that most people don't know how to leave well enough alone and think that just because they have this information that they need to act on it and use it to their advantage.

Likewise, you have the people who simply have no self-control and will fly off the handle and do something without knowing all the pieces and just assume they have heard enough to make up their mind. They would use that information to hurt their perceived enemies because in their messed up echo chamber if you're not Male, White, Christian, and Heterosexual then you're the wrong kind of American. The current issues surrounding abortion and women's rights only reinforce that mindset. These people label those differences as an "illness" and all that virtue signalling to make you feel like you're wrong if you believe otherwise.

Response to a deleted comment:

> Extralegal punishments like "cancelling", doxxing, and indirectly inciting violence on your political adversaries is becoming more common.

> And when that happens, it's understandable why the target above would want to get the person back with their own (possibly kinetic) extralegal punishment, if they can't take it through the court system, which is what already happens for people like drug dealers (they can't go through court system to fix bad deals).

> You also just have crazy people. "Talk shit, get hit" etc.

You're absolutely right. Vigilantism is a serious problem, and dressing it up as political activism is becoming increasingly common. You can't even avoid this by simply believing and saying the "correct" things because half the country is going to disagree with you regardless. In such an environment, anonymity is the best defense. Either you blend in with the crowd and never say anything interesting, hope that nobody ever singles you out for retaliation, or you cloak yourself in anonymity and speak your mind. The latter is something of an American tradition, born in a time of revolutionary strife when being on the wrong side could get you dead, imprisoned, or chased out of the country.

Aside: don't take downvotes so seriously. Sometimes good comments get hit with a lot of downvotes at first but get upvoted again later. Also they don't matter, the 'karma' is imaginary internet points and you can't buy anything with them. Ignore downvotes and speak your mind.

I’m sure there is at least one 4channer or serious cybercriminal reading this page and learning something they didn’t know before.

Then again, am I the crazy one for shredding my mail? Maybe I should scan it and put it all on my GitHub.

I think Sweden is/was a very high trust society.

People knew their fellow Swedes, many times with family links going back generations.

There are a lot of things you can do in a high trust society, that do not work in a society without that level of trust - for example, generous welfare benefits where you trust your neighbors not to exploit the system.

What has, in your opinion, contributed to an overall loss of trust in societies where it once was higher?

The sheer number of people. 7% of all humans who have ever lived are alive today.

And the only human you can truly trust after all is a dead one.

So I can trust 93% of all humans who have ever lived – impressive!

Some studies have found a negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust [1], but it is difficult to have discussions about this since it is such a sensitive topic. And of course it is not the only factor.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

Do you get a lot of scam calls? In the US this is a problem, I think most of the calls just use telephony software to automate and brute force every possible number. They spoof the originating phone number but they 99.9% likelihood are coming from another country with call centers like India or the Philippines.

If you can access every Swedish citizen's data, this could be attractive for scammers especially if you want to target elderly people. What about automated calls in general and spam?

Fully automated robocalls are… just not a thing here. There are some phone salespeople but personally I don't think I've got more than a single digit amount of calls per year.

I don't think phone numbers are quite _as_ searchable as other information. I get fewer spam calls here than I did in Australia. A few years ago a phone provider called me and actually offered a really good mobile deal, which I'm still on. Another time I had some kind of survey company call. I think there's been a couple more over the last decade, but it's a rare occurrence.

Re scam calls - luckily never gotten one of those in Sweden or elsewhere.

The ability to spoof in the phone system is so stupid. Someone was spoofing being the police here

I don't think I've ever gotten a spam call. I used to get the occasional telemarketer call, but I added my number to the NIX-registry (Do Not Call Registry) a few years ago and I've only gotten one marketing call since then.

Regulations around telemarketing are pretty strict here. I did report the one call I got and I got a follow-up email a few weeks later explaining what had happened (the company doing the marketing had experienced a technical glitch [1]).

[1] https://nixnamnden.se/2020/10/20-196-20-197-20-198-20-199-20...

> Do you get a lot of scam calls? In the US this is a problem

The US is also a large and attractive target, because the population is large and the setup costs of a phone scam can be amortized across a massive group. Remember that scamming is a numbers game - they have to hit massive numbers of targets in order for it to pay off, because the probability of success is so low at each stage.

Phone numbers within the US are compatible - there's no longer any meaningful difference between calling someone in Maine or Alaska - and it's easy to spoof area codes across state lines. So a scam that works in one state in the US can effectively be run in all 50 states with ~no change.

Sweden is a country only slightly larger than New York City, and an effective scam would likely have to be run in Swedish (a language not spoken widely outside Sweden, and therefore not transposable to another scam) and it's trickier to spoof numbers across country lines convincingly (even within the EU) than it is across state lines in the US.

This pattern plays out in a lot of ways, not just for Sweden. In general, smaller countries that speak languages not widely popular outside their home country will be less attractive targets (both for scams and for legitimate business) than countries which have a large potential market (target) size.

I was under the impression that most robo dialer's calls originated offshore with spoofed numbers that appear to be within your area code. It's possibly not though, like if someone is taking advantage of targeting a specific carrier's numbers from outside their network but I don't know. That might require the carrier to forward the calls. There are other exceptions for robo calls the callers could be using for themselves.

If the robodialers are actually doing this inside of the US we could probably find who these people are. I imagine the majority of calls are made by a few scaled up calling operations. That's what previous arrests for this suggest. Although the technology is catching up and I have been getting fewer calls.

> I was under the impression that most robo dialer's calls originated offshore with spoofed numbers that appear to be within your area code. It's possibly not though, like if someone is taking advantage of targeting a specific carrier's numbers from outside their network but I don't know.

Maybe this wasn't clear in my previous comment: the calls often originate from outside the country, yes, but the calls are spoofing US numbers, so there's no way for the recipient to know that the call is from another country. And the calls often try to match the local area code of the recipient.

The point is that the scam scales very easily: if you can do it to any person in one state, you can do it to every person in every state (because calling all US phone numbers is essentially equivalent, and spoofing all states is equivalently easy).

ya, that's what I have seen. I can't prove they originate from outside the country but I suspect it.

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