[hrimfaxi]

In the US, property tax records are public by design. However, historically the records were physical and hard to search through. Now that these records are digitized and published online, it is trivial to find out where someone resides by searching through these records. So while public by design, at scale data aggregation changes the threat model.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Phone books gave out most people's home address. There were data brokers transcribing them (before reliable OCR) to build their databases.