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I've had the misfortune to be present for an in-person demo of a verification service nearly a decade ago. It involved those relationship questions ("Which one
by monodeldiablo 10y ago
I've had the misfortune to be present for an in-person demo of a verification service nearly a decade ago. It involved those relationship questions ("Which one of the following people have you not lived with in the last 5 years?") that are incredibly creepy.
I was shocked that they had so much data on me -- I have no debt, no credit cards, no house, no car, no bills, and I had always entered informal rent agreements (I was poor) up to that point -- yet the rep was easily able to list all the places I had resided from college to present, along with a host of off-the-books housemates.
"Where the fsck did you get all this?!" I demanded.
"Have you ever ordered a pizza?"
Turns out, some fast food chains do a brisk business in reselling customer data. I had ordered from Domino's once, but that was enough to link my name to a specific location.
This experience has made me extremely sensitive about the information I give while making a purchase. When I lived in the US, I stopped having food delivered, paid in cash, and never signed up for branded credit cards. I rented informally and, whenever possible, tried to just pay the landlord my share of utilities in cash. Anything to keep a lower profile.
Far more companies than you realize are collecting as much data as possible about you, your habits, and your relations. So I'm afraid your search for a canonical list of data sources is ultimately fruitless. In this new economy, you are always the product.
- dkersten 10y agoYou might enjoy the book "how to be invisible" by J. J. Luna
- dredmorbius 10y agoTemporary postal mail forewards. USPS NCOA (Change of Address) file is another major data source. https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/08/how-the-post-office-sells-your-new-address-with-anyone-who-pays-and-the-little-known-loophole-to-opt-out/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2013/07/08/how-the-p...
- bogomipz 10y agoThanks for the tip, from the link: "There is, however, a loophole that keeps data brokers from accessing your updated address. When you fill out the online form to change an address, you can indicate a temporary change that provides six months of forwarding that can then be extended for another six months. That information, unlike the changes marked as permanent, is not included in the master list sold to data brokers." And the online link for online change of address with the loophole: https://moversguide.usps.com/icoa/home/icoa-main-flow.do?execution=e1s1&_flowId=icoa-main-flow https://moversguide.usps.com/icoa/home/icoa-main-flow.do?exe...
- stretchwithme 10y agoYes, but will they fail to forward the mail as reliably as they fail to forward permanently forwarded mail?
- dredmorbius 10y agoCorrect. (I've mentioned the temporary forwards tip elsewhere in the thread myself.)
- stretchwithme 10y agoWhat makes me crazy about having your mail forwarded is that they often don't even forward it to your new address. I know because I once lived with a crazy person and had to move out and they just kept delivering all my mail there despite duly submitting my forwarding address and stressing the importance of it. I still get mail for the last folks who lived here and they moved out 13 years ago. But anybody willing to pay the post office for the data can find out your new address. And then there's how we pay higher rates for first class mail so that junk mail can be cheaper. It's almost like the government doesn't work for the people.
- stevedekorte 10y agoGood to know. Let's all start ordering pizza's, etc under random other names. Create a haystack to hide the needle.
- smhost 10y agoA better strat would be if we all agreed on a single name for everyone to use.
- goombastic 10y agoI propose Null or Drop Table.
- spoiler 10y agoWhy not both? :) https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/
- gcb0 10y agoeasy to filter out
- cema 10y agoThis would not work, the data is heavily cross-referenced. You would simply have more names (as possible neighbors, or rather co-habitators) in your account.
- ams6110 10y agoDo we forget that not long ago everyone's name, address, and phone number was published in the phone book (unless you paid extra for an unlisted number), and hospital admissions were published in the daily newspaper. It used to be unremarkable, and now people shriek "privacy!!" when it's discovered that some mundane detail about their life is not a closely held secret.
- maldeh 10y agoIt's likely the locality / ephemerality / repudiability of those identifiers made them less of a big deal in an era when people couldn't instantly look these details up or build a detailed profile of everybody given the right data sources.
- intended 10y agoNo we don't forget. Those systems were analog and could only be scaled to a certain extent, after which you ran into management overhead. So in the example given by the OP, dominoes would not be updating your name in the directory. That would be data that evaporated and never made it to record. To increase the contrast - whole new types of clustering and analysis are now possible, at the moment a new data point is received.
- amichal 10y agoi once worked on a project (about 15 years ago) where we had access to a reverse phone book listing that was generated in part by having a copy of every distinct paper phonebook in the US (also things like school directories) sent overseas to be hand entered (2-3 times for QC). A "nice" feature of it was that the address info was also geocoded so we could answer questions like "Who are my closest 100 neighbors and what are their home phone numbers?". Between that and Google buying the archives of usenet[1] in the same basic timeframe I realized that if it's written down its not likely to stay private for long. Edit: add citation [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News
- revelation 10y agoThis reminds me of the decision on GPS trackers on cars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jones_(2012) Dreeben cited United States v. Knotts as an example where police were allowed to use a device known as a "beeper" that allows the tracking of a car from a short distance away. Chief Justice Roberts distinguished the current case from Knotts, saying that using a beeper still took "a lot of work" whereas a GPS device allows the police to "sit back in the station ... and push a button whenever they want to find out where the car is."
- asperous 10y agoTheir privacy policy says they don't do this: https://www.dominos.com/en/#/content/privacy/ https://www.dominos.com/en/#/content/privacy/
- mysticmarvel 10y agoThat link at the bottom of the email states that they unsubscribe you from the mailing list. Odd how I always seem to get more spam, but from different companies, after I click one. Almost as though all I've done is confirm that the email address actually exists, and is therefore more valuable to sell on to others.
- whatdiditsay88 10y ago> in-person demo of a verification service nearly a decade ago. What did their privacy policy say "nearly a decade ago".
- monodeldiablo 10y agoPerhaps the policy is new. This was about a decade ago. Regardless, that data is out there now, and no change in privacy policy is going to put that cat back into the bag. Besides, someone else is surely acting as a new source for current data. It wasn't just my location information, though. They were able to ask detailed questions about my personal social network, before Facebook was ubiquitous and LinkedIn was a thing. They were clearly joining several disparate datasets together to discovery relationships.