[riedel]

I cannot speak for the US but in Germany there is certainly some amount of violence towards local politicians but also other parts of administration (job centers, etc) Traditionally there was maximum transparency (names of every single reponsible person for each minor municipal job) with little choice for employees to opt out. This is changing not under special rules but mostly under GDPR adoption. However, particularly elected officials (even for very minor local roles) even have to expose their street address to get elected (such legal requirements can provide GDPR exception). This generates real risk. If less and less or the "wrong" people go into administration we are in trouble, IMHO. I know there is a lot of governments vs the people sentiment popping up. But we need to just make sure that we treat our administration also as people in certain situations. (Disclaimer: as a university lecturer I am officially a public servant, but I do not think any of this would apply to me: I hardly have to fear the wrath of the students)

[pc86]

Perhaps a uniquely American opinion, but employees can opt out quickly and easily by not getting paid by public funds. Most public sector jobs have private sector equivalents. If you want to help people find jobs and your privacy is important enough to make public sector work untenable, get a job with one of the private sector organizations that does that.

> elected officials...have to expose their street address to get elected. This generates real risk.

Is there an epidemic of local German politicians being harassed and assaulted at their homes?

I can think of no reason why constituents should not know where the people in power over them live. Elected officials should not be able to hide from their constituents.

[forgetfreeman]

Making it slightly more involved for randos to show up at your literal doorstep hardly seems like hiding from one's constituency.

[anonymous908213]

> I can think of no reason why constituents should not know where the people in power over them live.

I can think of plenty of reasons. Political violence in democracies is on the rise globally, and not the sort of organized political violence that people might use to liberate themselves from the chains of oppressors, but rather the kind of lunatic political violence that is committed by irrational lone actors who are fundamentally mentally unwell.

I believe you can have political transparency without involving people's homes and families.

[direwolf20]

When an overworked air traffic controller in Germany gave a plane an instruction that happened to be the opposite of TCAS automatic collision avoidance system, and one pilot followed TCAS to avoid a collision and one followed the controller, the planes crashed and everybody died. A family member of one of the passengers looked up, hunted down, and murdered in cold blood the air traffic controller.

[krisoft]

> an overworked air traffic controller in Germany

Actually the air traffic controller in question was Swiss not German.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_%C3%9Cberlingen_mid-air_c...

[fc417fc802]

You left out - was a foreigner, managed to escape, faced zero consequences at home (AFAIK).

[phainopepla2]

He didn't escape, he sentence was reduced from 8 to 3 1/2 by a Swiss judge. The reasoning was that his mental state was properly accounted for. Who knows if lobbying from Russia played a part in that. Also, not only did he face no consequences at home, he was celebrated and given a high-level job.

Maybe it's my American-ness showing, but it's pretty shocking to me that 8 years was considered too harsh for someone who stabbed a man to death in front of his family.

On the other hand, I suppose one could argue that the perpetrator was highly unlikely to commit a similar act in the future, if only because his motivation was the death of his own family, who would no longer be around to inspire him to violence a second time.

[pc86]

Until some other nefarious air traffic controller waits for him to remarry and have another family.

[whattheheckheck]

Its literally the last check of power... rich people will find out exactly where the power people live. The masses also need to know

[anonymous908213]

The last check on power is murdering politicians in their homes? I beg to differ. If the situation is so bad that violence is truly necessary, the last check is an organized revolution, not an assassination. If the figure is a genuine dictator and important enough to have real power, they would have extensive security surrounding their home anyways. This fantasy of assassinating a would-be Putin or whatever does not justify exposing the addresses of city councilmen or judges or whatever random public servant somebody wants to kill over their grievances.

[autoexec]

> The last check on power is murdering politicians in their homes?

You said murder, but there are plenty of valid reasons that the public should know who holds positions of power and where they live that don't involve violence of any kind.

Protest is an essential freedom we have and it's perfectly valid to do it outside of the homes of those we have put in power. It's also useful to have that information when investigating fraud and corruption.

[anonymous908213]

I don't think there is any reason to protest outside people's personal residences. People can protest at a government building, or a public square, or somewhere intentionally disruptive that isn't implicitly aimed at intimidating a public servant. Especially given that protests can turn violent, having a mob outside a specific individual's house is reckless and can quickly escalate in the wrong way. I think it's worth noting that the people protesting won't always be people you agree with. People protest both sides of a given cause. Perhaps you think it is justified to form an intimidation mob for your cause, but would you feel the same way about the opposing side of the issue doing the same? For a civil society to flourish, I think there needs to be a common understanding that there are limits to how people should conduct themselves.

> It's also useful to have that information when investigating fraud and corruption.

This is the purview of journalists, police, and independent investigative boards. We do not need random unqualified people stalking politicians to uncover fraud. I'm not sure I've ever heard of a case where that a random nobody ended up uncovering fraud or corruption by stalking, but I have heard of dozens of cases of public servants being targeted and murdered in their homes.

[cucumber3732842]

Are there more lunatics or has the number of lunatics remained unchanged but the frequency of situations and events and availability of information and events that make them act increased?

It's not like there's a control earth to compare to.

[pc86]

Government employees, including and especially elected officials, are employees of the people and the people have a right to the same information any employer has about their employees.

> Political violence in democracies is on the rise globally

Citation needed, but even if we say for the sake of argument this is accurate, that doesn't naturally lead to this outcome.

What makes violence political?

Is political violence inherently worse? I think it is, but there's at least an argument to be made that it isn't.

Is stopping that political violence worth the worst case scenario where we make it harder for the public to get this type of information?

[16bitvoid]

I'd argue that employers shouldn't have access to employee's home addresses either, outside of situations where it's needed (e.g., employee chooses to get paycheck by mail instead of direct deposit). Most employers keep access to personal employee information (PII) restricted to HR/timekeeping/payroll departments anyway.

Why would my direct supervisor need my home address?

[fc417fc802]

To match more closely the question about politicians, why would you need the home address of your direct supervisor? Seems quite suspect to me.

[anonymous908213]

> Government employees, including and especially elected officials, are employees of the people and the people have a right to the same information any employer has about their employees.

I don't think any employer has any right to know their employee's home address, to be honest.

> Is political violence inherently worse? I think it is, but there's at least an argument to be made that it isn't.

I think this question is rather besides the point. Random acts of violence are bad, so let's not make anybody's home address public information. In the age of the internet, we routinely observe millions of people fixating on one person for some perceived grievance or another, wherein it only takes one lunatic among those millions having access to private information to result in a tragedy. We don't have to make it so easy for these tragedies to happen.

[pc86]

> I don't think any employer has any right to know their employee's home address, to be honest.

Regardless of whether this should be the case or not, it is the case is every country I can think of.

I agree I think we're straying from the point a bit. When is the last time you can point to an act of political violence that would not have occurred had some public servant or elected official's address not been on a website or spreadsheet somewhere?

These things simply don't happen enough to warrant further limiting government officials' accountability to the public.

[anonymous908213]

> Regardless of whether this should be the case or not, it is the case is every country I can think of.

And we are specifically talking about advocacy for legislation to change that. The report advocates for changing legislation to benefit government employees as a privileged class, while I think the common-sense position is to ensure the privacy of every citizen.

> When is the last time you can point to an act of political violence that would not have occurred had some public servant or elected official's address not been on a website or spreadsheet somewhere?

These attacks happen often, but a particularly notable case was that in the US, June 2025, where a mentally unhinged terrorist assassinated two public servants in their home, shot two others in another home (although they survived), and had a hitlist of other legislators' homes to target, although he was stopped before he could continue his spree. In fact he had stopped by four homes in total, but by chance the occupants were gone from one and the police were already checking in on another and he left without acting there. This was a tragedy that could only have happened in the way it did because of home addresses being so freely available, and it was pure luck that the tragedy was not even worse than it happened to be.

> These things simply don't happen enough to warrant further limiting government officials' accountability to the public.

What accountability to the public is meaningfully gained by letting people attack your home? "Random people going to legislators' doorsteps" is not a legitimate part of the democratic process of any country I'm familiar with.

[dTal]

Setting aside "elected officials"... government employees are already undercompensated compared to the private sector, making it difficult to attract talent. Eroding their personal rights and exposing them to personal risk on top of that is a recipe for shrinking the government to nothing. Do that and you might as well cut to the chase and hand the whole kit and kaboodle over to the private sector and be done with it.

[cortesoft]

I really think the entire concept of privacy has really changed in my lifetime, especially around what needs to be kept private and what we don’t mind sharing.

When I was a youth in the 80s and 90s, it seems like our desire for privacy was focused on what we were doing and talking about; we didn’t want people to know our activities or what our conversations were about. Someone listening in while you talked to someone else was considered an invasion of privacy. However, we freely shared identifying information and didn’t think that was something that needed to be protected. In my town, our phone book white pages had everyone in town’s name, phone number, and address. Those details weren’t things we thought needed to be kept hidden from the public. Every now and then you would hear about someone who was “unlisted”, but that was considered odd.

Now, people will freely post pictures about their activities in public places, have public conversations, and share all sorts of details about how they live their lives that we would never have shared with strangers 40 years ago. At the same time, the idea of publishing our name, address, and phone number for everyone to see is horrifying. We even have a term for it, “doxing”, which many people want to make a crime, and we would never have even thought about it 40 years ago.

I think there are a ton of valid reasons for this shift, but it does make me think. A major part of why we want to keep those details private is because we have created so many systems that allow you to commit fraud or take advantage of people with only those details. While I think we should maintain and extend our ability to keep those details about us secret, I also think we need to do something about the systems we have in place that allow you to do so much damage to a person with only knowing these basic details about them.

[anonymous908213]

The report linked in the article doesn't mention existing laws mandating disclosure of public servant details or anything of that nature. It primarily focuses on private data brokers collecting and selling data, a threat model which applies to all people equally. Rather than addressing the problem at its root, which is the data brokers blatantly violating the privacy of everyone, by all appearances they are perfectly fine with what data brokers do as long as they are able to exempt themselves from it.

I think that posting street addresses for "maximum transparency" is a bit silly, and it would probably make sense to repeal legislation that makes government employee's sensitive private information public. That principle should also apply equally to all citizens, though. If I'm not mistaken, I believe anyone who hosts a website in Germany is mandated by law to post their address on the website, which is completely unfathomable to me.

We do also see the two-tier surveillance hierarchy attempting to be established across the EU, in general. Chat Control in all its forms is always proposed with an exemption for government employees.