20
votes
I spent a year deleting my address online, then it popped up on Bing
Link information
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- Title
- I deleted my residential address from any and every place I found it at on the internet. After I was finished and everything was gone, Bing dug up a Google Maps link to my street and it is now the top search result when searching for my name
- Published
- Jan 1 2021
- Word count
- 191 words
What gets me here is the line about "the public interest to access this information outweighs my right to privacy." And Bing just determines that? Is this based on a law, or just "because we said so" reasoning? That seems like an awfully big claim to make about someone's home address.
I guess you could look up who owns a house in public records, but the specifics of who all currently lives there would be very difficult to accurately put together I'd think, especially in cases of renters or children. I suppose old phone books used to have people's addresses listed by their names? I'm just trying to think of any comparable public record here that would make such a determination remotely justifiable.
I think a lot of people who're under 40 just have a different perspective than others. Because corporations use their information in ways they don't like, they assume that there are huge problems with things that are in the public interest being available to the public.
Some localities let you opt out of having public phone numbers. Others do the same allowing you to choose or apply for a secret address. Some expect companies to list contact information to specific employees on their company websites, others find that extremely jarring.
My tax returns are a matter of public record. Anyone can search my name and find out exactly how much I made, the net value of my estate, how much I paid in taxes. Along with that, they'll find my exact date of birth.
It's a matter of public record if I'm ever charged with a crime, or someone takes me to court although the charges are just a joke. If my personal medical history is every presented as evidence in court, it's a matter of public record. I've sat in the courtroom as a 20-year old had her medical history in detail be presented, while anyone who wanted to (including her parents) could read dated logs of how she asked the school nurse how to get on birth control without her parents knowing. It was completely irrelevant to the case at hand, but was between other relevant entries she had to use to prove her innocence.
There are public, searchable registries in my location that let me check that someone who claims they're a medical doctor actually are, or that the registered picture of a police officer matches the name on her badge.
Modern society requires public record of a ton of different things because relying on trust just isn't acceptable to many in the same way it was some decades ago. What if I need to get in touch with my neighbor for some reason? How much does that neighbor have a right to hide away as opposed to my right to get in touch with them to assert my own rights?
Society as a whole benefits from the lowest level of conflict possible: If someone is impossible to contact because you can't find their address, phone number etc. then how can I demand they move their camper from my property? Society benefits if that doesn't become a huge court case, or even worse if I end up destroying their camper of whatever because it's technically within my rights.
I'm a part of society whether I like it or not. I think many young people lack an understanding of what that entails: You're part of the public record. Only if you have legitimate reasons for exceptions, things being public is in the interest of society.
I think it's very telling that the top response to that reddit thread is to ask the submitter to lie and use an exception they don't fall in under to cheat the system. But only to do so if they haven't already said things that could lead them to being caught in that lie.
The trouble with all that you mentioned being public (taxes, income, DOB/age, address, certifications, some medical records, etc.) is rather specific to modern times, so I could see where younger people would have a bigger problem with it. It's not just "public" anymore, but insanely public. Cross-referencing all those things in ways the internet makes it very easy to do gives malicious actors an unbelievable amount of power to harass someone and act on their behalf with almost no effort.
I'm all for living in a society, but I'm also not sure how being able to practically impersonate someone two states over or deanonymize someone I disagree with and near-effortlessly build out a complete profile of their whole existence down to streetview photos of where they sleep at night is really in society's interest anymore when we have so much power to act remotely through instant nation-/worldwide services. Just see swatting as a practical example of how this can go very wrong.
I can knock on my neighbor's door and ask him to move the camper without needing his photos from ten years ago from his Clearview profile. Society doesn't require this genie to be out of the bottle even for localized interactions like this, but oh boy is it out.
40 years ago building out such a profile on someone would have required prohibitively expensive and time-consuming leg work, probably only within reach of governments or private investigators. As such, I can't imagine it was terribly concerning to leave little unconnected bits of data laying around in the archives of one courthouse or the pages of one phonebook.
And of course you should be able to verify someone's medical license or status as a police officer, but I'm not sure you need full, unfettered access to their entire lives shotgunned out onto the internet in order to do that. Specific, minimally sufficient data to verify specific requests would be more to my preference here.
You point out the lack of legal protections against harassment. That's the issue, not information being public. That type of harassment can still take place without the information being public.
The second issue you point out is with how countries and companies choose to verify identity.
I have a Norwegian bank ID. It's directly connected to my social security number. It has used two-factor-identification for more than two decades. When the government sends me documents, when health care providers send me test results, when i log in to change my insurance, when i pay by credit card online, for all these things I log in using my bank ID.
There are systems of public record for me (like looking up individual property ownership) that is built in ways to make creating databases hard/impossible. If I want to check out who owns a house, I log in. I get 10 searches before I have to log in again with 2FA in ways a robot can't do. And so on.
I haven't ever heard of a young person using offline record keeping services to gain access to this type of information themselves. That's why I believe in the generational split on the issue.
I've made FOIA requests in the US. I've requested access to public records with paper trails from the previous millennium. All the information is there. It's public. I can automate email requests for mass information.
In my Norwegian identity portal, I get a full log of who's logged in and accessed my personal tax records. These are not young people.
I think you vastly overstate how hard it was to build a profile on someone pre-internet. You followed a guide, sent prewritten letters per the instructions, and just waited for the answers. I did this with a family member to prove a point and win a bet. I was astounded by what I got and how easy it was. We do not have private lives unless we opt out of most of the major things a post-WWII society regulates and requires documentation for.
There's a whole US industry of serving people with subpoenas because of the lack of public records meaning you can simply avoid persecution since the authorities can't even get to you. US society needs more information about people to be public, not less. It works in the EU.
I think many people feel a false sense of security and a false sense of obscurity because they don't know where they can find all the information about themselves that others can with a tiny bit of effort. I choose to act as though the things I do are available. Currently all mail/emails/permit requests and so on sent to a Norwegian municipality is public. Old documents before the internet was a big thing have been digitalized. Things are being OCR'd and are quickly becoming searchable. For me I believe it's prudent to act as though things are public. I'd recommend the same to everyone else too.
They are not arguing for legal protections against harassment, they are arguing for protections against scenarios like the OP where their right to privacy and potentially safety is overridden arbitrarily. It absolutely is the issue, and in the case of swatting, doxxing and other typical online harassment techniques the idea of such easily accessible information is paramount.
Your anecdote about the Norwegian ID system is more along the lines of security and authentication, not privacy. There is a point to be made for controlled access of information, but I beg the question: Are you ever concerned that all of that information is collectively held behind the same authentication measures? Convenience comes at a price, nothing is unhackable. In America, you don't even need to authenticate with anybody to get where someone lives like in your example, you just need a full name and in most cases voter records or property records will be listed.
Furthering the line about convenience, I posit that's what this is about to a degree and not a generational split. The original post says the corporation asserts the right to privacy is outweighed by public interest. Why shouldn't there be barriers like FOIA requests and certified letters? Why should any schmuck be able to look me up? Frankly, why should some of this information be so open? Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
In the case of online harassment, these barriers would most certainly shore out most instances. As for needing to be found by authorities, that is simply apples to oranges. If a court or law enforcement entity wants to find you, they have access to databases and intelligence units that can search social media. There is absolutely no reason that a private citizen needs comparable access for any reason, it shouldn't be impossible, but not so easy.
I'm sorry that you feel that your right to privacy is less important than everybody and their brother, you seem very ready to give that up in the name of society "functioning". I'm not ready and your convenience is outweighed by my interests to privacy.
(I'd have written more, but sent from my phone)
This is a very astute response. Thank you for posting it.
I'd also like use to keep age out of this conversation. I'm older than something like 98% of the posters here, and I'm quite concerned with technology's reach into our private lives. I remember having a similar conversation to this with a friend in the early 90s. At least back then I could argue that he just wasn't aware of where all this is headed. But now we know.
Yeah, that’s the toughie, phone books would have your name, address, and phone number in it. That said, in most cases you could only look people up by name (although if receiving calls, you could trace using a star code); and there’s significantly more data mining applications associated with this. Personally, I think one of the major issues is that state and local governments didn’t get involved early on to insure there was one place your information was listed with some standards for uniformity.
Phone companies permitted unlisted numbers, obfuscated entries (e.g., initial rather than name), and listing without an address (after all the service was a phone directory. Requests for obscured, reduced, or no entry were respected, occasionally for a small fee.
Submission Statement: German Redditor TimelessStrawberry spent most of a year scrubbing their personal data from appearing online only to have Microsoft's Bing reference a name search with a Google Maps pin for their precise street address. Response to a GDPR request to Microsoft for removaal of references to TimelessStrawberry's name was "the public interest to access this information outweighs my right to privacy".
Suggestions in the Reddit thread include taking up the matter wwith EU authorities, including their MEP, German, and EU authorities, including European Data Protection Supervisor; further requests or legal demands of Microsoft, or data poisoning/data chaffing, amongst others.
Maybe this post should have a submission statement. I'm not sure what is to be gathered from this. Seems like another juncture where "right to be forgotten" clashes with free speech laws.