I was talking to a coworker about these new phishing attacks that send your name and address and sometimes a picture of your house, and I was saying how creepy it is, and they told me that phonebooks were delivered to everyone and used to have like literally everyone in a city listed by last name with their phone number and address. Is that for real?
I use one of those services, Optery in my case. Do you think that’s just a waste of money (honest question)? It definitely reduced my footprint for simple googling, but I’ve been wondering if it’s really worth the cost.
Honestly? It’s not something I would pay for. Google has their own service where they’ll let you know if they find your information and you can ask them to remove the search result.
Beyond that, there’s some information that you just fundamentally can’t make private and no service can get taken down.
Most data mining sites just collect those public records and put them next to each other, so they get a pile of your name, birthday, where you were born, how active you are as a voter and all that stuff.
Removing your address from Google maps just seems silly to me. That there is a residence there is fundamentally public information, not being on maps doesn’t make it less public it just probably causes issues for delivery drivers.
Anyone who has your data and is going to be a jerk about it isn’t going to listen to a request to take it down either. They’re just going to send you spam messages.
The odds of being Targeted by a determined individual who’s focused explicitly on you is low. They tend to target a broad swath of people, and then dig in on people who take the bait a few times.
Hmm. Thanks for your response. It does it across across about 600 databases, and they have power of attorney to initiate the removals and follow up, etc.
I guess I just didn’t like that it was so easy to just Google my name and then have my address. It did help with that, but maybe you’re right that it’s kind of pointless in the bigger sense. I guess I’m just trying to keep someone IRL that gets pissed at me for whatever reason from immediately knowing where I live. I feel like most people aren’t going to work very hard at it.
Yeah, and it’s not like you want the information out there, it’s just that in my opinion it’s not something I would pay money for. Having the authority to make the request doesn’t mean that the party on the other end is obligated to comply, or in some cases even legally permitted to.
I’ve used Google’s service where they send you an email to review results if they find something, and my Google results for my incredibly distinctive name are basically only professional resources that I kinda want to be findable.
Yeah that makes sense. Though, hopefully more states (or the fed) follow California, Connecticut, Colorado, and Virginia’s lead in passing right to be deleted and stronger digital privacy laws.