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by herpderp3dtwerp 3010 days ago
You can get all of this information from a phone number too.

https://www.twilio.com/marketplace/add-ons/nextcaller-advanc...

Give it a try with your phone number. It'll provide your address (current and former), income bracket, relatives, siblings, children, etc, etc.

Guess what Facebook asks you to provide when initially setting up!?

5 comments

600+ Million records:

"Name, Address, Email, Carrier, Line Type, Secondary Phone, Age, Gender, Household Income, Marital Status, Presence of Children, Home Owner Status, Home Market Value, Length of Residence, High Net Worth, Occupation, Education Level, Twitter Handle & Followers, Facebook Profile & Followers, LinkedIn Profile"

Don't forget number of steps per day, resting heartbeat rate...
No, that's not included. Read the link.

I do not speak for Fitbit, but I work for Fitbit, and I do not appreciate my employer being baselessly lumped in with violators of privacy.

baselessly lumped in with violators of privacy

It's not a baseless assumption that fitness trackers abuse access to people's private data. Maybe your particular fitness tracker doesn't today. That doesn't mean others don't.

And I am - for argument's sake - agreeing with the notion that privacy violation happens when the online service does something "wrong" with the data, not when the online service demands to keep their own copy, for their own uses, as a precondition to using the software.

History has shown that software that sends as much data home as possible can simply not be trusted with that data. Fitbit is one "innovation" or management team change away from further abusing the access to their user's data. I don't mean to coldly disregard the fact you trust your employer. But if I want an accurate assessment I can't care. Facebook employees trust Facebook.

My employer was being lumped in with a currently existing privacy violation. I won't argue much against hypothetical future possible privacy violations. I'll just point out that web-based email, your credit card company, and whoever installs software on your smart phone overshadow privacy implications associated with fitness trackers.
The difference is that all of that is public information. The kind of tracking that Facebook and Google are doing is not explicitly public information. They infer secrets about your private life from little bits of "innocuous" data that you sweat away during your everyday activities.
> Guess what Facebook asks you to provide when initially setting up!?

Amusingly enough, so does Fetlife (NSFW). It's not outside the realm of possibility that even your specific kinks could be appended to that list.

Just tried this for several people I know. It only kinda-sorta gets things right. It generally gets the name right and sometimes the address.... but not much else.
You can't get someone's bank from that. You can likely figure out someone's bank if you monitor their location over time, though.