[anonu]

There's almost no real privacy online in the US. When I search for my name my phone number and almost every address I've ever lived at it is publicly retrievable - on multiple sites. Even with a private WHOIS I get spam from various companies via my registrar asking to speak to me about making a website.

[rootusrootus]

You can get some of the major sources to remove you with a service like Optery [0]. Costs a few bucks, but if you let them work at it a few months you can drop the subscription and the effects will linger for a while before you start finding yourself on public databases again.

I used it myself and I have trouble finding information about myself, even with my inside knowledge. If someone is determined enough you probably can't really hide from them, especially if they have any connections to law enforcement or one of the big data sinks. But you can definitely make it harder for casuals.

[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/optery

[yieldcrv]

I just can't get myself to pay for this problem that's ultimately a failure of the government and relies on another corporation behaving with my data

fortunately I'm a California resident so looks like that government has passed a solution that's free, thanks for sharing that guys

[rootusrootus]

Eventually I hope other states like Oregon will get that, since they tend to copy California legislation. But in the meantime, I will pay a few bucks, because while it may be a failure of the government, I cannot wave a magic wand and fix that. But I can make the data itself go away for awhile.

[tuwtuwtuwtuw]

Here in sweden, personal data such as name, address, income, birth date, personal number, car ownership, etc. is public by design.

I find it interesting how the view on this differs depending on country and what people are used to.

[yieldcrv]

The issue is the spam

All of our personal identification data is available, not by design, but it is available

[tuwtuwtuwtuw]

What kind of spam is that? All my info is available online, but I don't really get much spam. Of course, I get spam to my email but my email address is everywhere (also by design) so that's no wonder.

[yieldcrv]

Its caller spam, this subthread is about a shared American experience of receiving spam calls to our cellphones all day in such volume that many of us route all calls to voicemail automatically.

I think you're misinterpreting it as an obsession over privacy. We are victims of unscrupulous scam caller spam due to a multi tiered failure in how our government implements public utilities, and in the meantime we are chiseling at solutions such as enforcing rules on the data brokers who have our information for lease.

Which seems to be working, for people that pay for services to solve this problem. And California's government is simply doing that same service for free for its residents.

[marysol5]

The one I do find interesting, is how the concept of "privacy" has changed in the internet realm.

It wasn't all that long ago I could look up anybody in my town (or any town really) in a big book, and get contact details for them. Unless they specifically opt-out.

But now that concept is seen as madness.

Now companies no longer even list phone numbers or e-mail addresses on their own websites!

[ZeWaka]

It's worth sitting down for an hour and filing a bunch of information redaction requests.

[edot]

Might help with phone numbers, but addresses are trivial to find and cannot be removed, if you own property in the United States. Every county publishes property records, searchable by name. Unless you own your house with an LLC, if someone knows or can guess the state you live in, they can 1) search on the property records website of the top 10 counties by population, and if that fails 2) expand to searching other counties until you pop up. Not sure how to mitigate this, other than the LLC method.

[ZeWaka]

Addresses can also be trivially found via voter records.

[EduardoBautista]

There are services that will submit this information to hundreds of sites for you.

I used incogni and it seemed to have a positive result.

https://incogni.com/

[bragr]

Or if you're in California: https://privacy.ca.gov/drop/

[Barbing]

Thank you! How’d you find out about this?

[bragr]

It was in the news when it went into effect at the beginning of the year.

[marysol5]

"And now a segue to our sponsor, offering a service utterly unique to the USA"