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Comment by ProllyInfamous | Hacker News Reader

>Court records for instance

I use neither email (for years now, a blessing!) nor have my own phone number (VOIP outbound, only). Anything requiring either gets a burner.email or my numeric pager.

A recent civil court action requested both of these obsolete (to me) technologies, and the judge's clerk required that I sign an attestation upon leaving them unanswerable.

Court records are public in my jurisdiction, and I choose to be "unreachable."

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Regarding the linked-to article, a harrowing read (certainly)! US citizens are allowed, by law, to request a FREE COPY of everything LexusNexis has on them in their private consumer file.

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Re: lexusnexus, i wish they provided their data in a more legible format. Last time i requested my data it was provided in such a way where the data needed to be cross referenced with a legend which itself needed to be cross referenced with yet another table which made the whole data dump unreadable.

As someone who used to broker Lexis data, lemme tell you, you don’t want what comes out of their API either.

I used an online request option, in 2018, which required LexisNexus to send me my "entire profile" — which resulted in a 150+ page document physically arriving in my mailbox.

Interesting, you've inspired me to request my own. I'm excited to see what comes in the mail!

I’d love to read more about your contact system if you’ve written about it or care to. I’m mostly unavailable on the phone except to people who are in my contact list (do not disturb mode) but I wouldn’t mind considering how to take it a step farther.

The basics are this:

I have a numeric (ONLY #'s allowed) pager — pagersdirect . net (coverage available nationally, paid for each metro area you will use pager). I have no affiliation with PDnet, other than as a customer.

If you wish to reach me, you text me your phone number (or a "code" if we have arranged such)... I then call back from an unregistered VOIP calling service (no phone number, so cannot receive calls).

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As for not using email, this was simple: just stop using it! Paul Graham has a great lectures (decades old, now!) wherein he complains that "email is just a to-do list, which other people can place tasks onto." Incredible how we haven't implemented a solution for this yet (e.g. now-depricated hashcash authentication).

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