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I have a fairly unique name. Anyway 5 years ago I was on a date, met the girl online. She started asking me about places I had lived... and she just knew way

I have a fairly unique name. Anyway 5 years ago I was on a date, met the girl online. She started asking me about places I had lived... and she just knew way too much about me. She confessed she had paid like $20 to look me up on one of those extended search services before the date. There was no second date. Totally creeped me out... but I did get the name of the service she used, and when I got home I ran a search on myself to see what all was there. What's worse than all the information being out there, or parallel I guess, is that the shitty service had a bunch of information wrong. It said I lived in a state where I co-signed a lease for my sister (and since I have the same last name as my sister the service drew the conclusion we were married), it said that I still owned a home in yet another state (I had sold it years before)... It also returned my year-by-year income (most of which was fairly accurate), court records (even from when I was a little kid showing up at my parents' divorce hearing), and the exact amount I still owed on my house. No clue how they got all that shit. Around that time I went looking for ways to purge it all, I stumbled across this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/j1mit/how_to_remove_yourself_from_all_background_check/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/j1mit/how_to_re... I filled out every opt-out form I could find. Here we are, 5 years later... I can say... a few less scammy sites show up when you search for me... but on the whole not really much impact. A bunch of information these sites have is still wrong, and a lot of the sites... even if you go through all the trouble of opting out... they only honor the opt-out for a year. I asked my lawyer if there was a way, how do celebrities and such keep their records out of these people's hands... and his response was, "You probably have to contact each site and pay then to take you off..." At which point I decided to cheer if anyone ever fire-bombed the offices of Radaris or Spokeo or Yatedo or any of the other shit-information sites. We need laws that make it legal for us to all kick the CEO of these companies in the nuts -- one good solid kick each. Freedom of information, all that... necessary for democracy... and it's just a short hop from there over to aggregation services... but we should at least ensure that people who want to profit off eroding privacy shouldn't be able to reproduce. Seems like there was an update to that post. https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/31u84n/how_to_remove_yourself_from_most_background_check/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/31u84n/how_to_r...

contingencies 10y ago
...fire-bombed the offices of... To be clear, just in case anyone reading does not understand, this would have no impact as data is now routinely stored at multiple, geographically disparate data centers run by disparate companies within completely distinct legal jurisdictions, as contracted by distinct legal entities, and these are increasingly all kept secret via services like Cloudflare, corporate service agents, DNS privacy services, international accountants and lawyers. So... don't go getting firebombing ideas. Instead, take your pyro inklings out through the retro game Pyro ][ in which our protagonist begins by burning down the IRS - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pyro+2+abandonware https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pyro+2+abandonware
- krapp 10y ago
  A large scale, sustained global atmospheric thermonuclear barrage might do the trick - generate a wave of electromagnetic pulses and fry all the electronics on the planet.
  - dbg31415 10y ago
    Ha, not quite worth it... yet.
  - contingencies 10y ago
    You'd need some serious power to get the subterranean ones and the shielded ones.
    - krapp 10y ago
      If you take out enough of the internet's infrastructure, the rest of it becomes pretty useless. You'd have to take out the satellites too, though - I forgot about that. All the satellites.
nommm-nommm 10y ago
There is a database of mortgages, I forgot what it was called though, that's how they know what you owed on your house. Most of that stuff is pretty easy to find on local records, it's just a dumb aggregator, they are getting the information from elsewhere. If I had time I'd be able to find 80% of that information on you now. If I had access to a few nonpublic databases (like a PI would) I'd have access to everything. And since I am a smart human not a dumb machine id probably be able to tell most of the innacurate information was inaccurate.

contingencies 10y ago

...fire-bombed the offices of... To be clear, just in case anyone reading does not understand, this would have no impact as data is now routinely stored at multiple, geographically disparate data centers run by disparate companies within completely distinct legal jurisdictions, as contracted by distinct legal entities, and these are increasingly all kept secret via services like Cloudflare, corporate service agents, DNS privacy services, international accountants and lawyers. So... don't go getting firebombing ideas. Instead, take your pyro inklings out through the retro game Pyro ][ in which our protagonist begins by burning down the IRS - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pyro+2+abandonware https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pyro+2+abandonware

krapp 10y ago
A large scale, sustained global atmospheric thermonuclear barrage might do the trick - generate a wave of electromagnetic pulses and fry all the electronics on the planet.
- dbg31415 10y ago
  Ha, not quite worth it... yet.
- contingencies 10y ago
  You'd need some serious power to get the subterranean ones and the shielded ones.
  - krapp 10y ago
    If you take out enough of the internet's infrastructure, the rest of it becomes pretty useless. You'd have to take out the satellites too, though - I forgot about that. All the satellites.

nommm-nommm 10y ago

There is a database of mortgages, I forgot what it was called though, that's how they know what you owed on your house. Most of that stuff is pretty easy to find on local records, it's just a dumb aggregator, they are getting the information from elsewhere. If I had time I'd be able to find 80% of that information on you now. If I had access to a few nonpublic databases (like a PI would) I'd have access to everything. And since I am a smart human not a dumb machine id probably be able to tell most of the innacurate information was inaccurate.