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No. Stop. An email address is not a publicly available record. And I have no idea how on earth you could think it would be.

• joecool1029 10y ago
  >No. Stop. An email address is not a publicly available record. Sure it is. it's given out extensively for individuals to contact you. Same as a phone number used to be published in a phone book. Same as we publish public keys and same as your username here is public. It is by definition, something that is shared to the public for public use... as opposed to a secret like a passphrase or private key.
  • nkrisc 10y ago
    And if you only give an email address to a single company to open an account with them? Is that public too? Not everyone has a single email address they give to anyone who asks for it. There's "public" as in you're not the only person who knows it (not secret) and there's "public" as in it is freely available to anyone who wants it without any interaction with you personally.
  • tjoff 10y ago
    Yes, it is given out to individuals and corporations voluntarily by me. Normally noone have the means to find out what email address I have without asking me. Hence it is NOT a public record. A phone number can be unlisted (the term differs between different countries) - which is not the same as being "hidden/private" it just means that it isn't a publicly available record and not listed in phone books. How can this be a foreign concept?
  • bpchaps 10y ago
    Yeah, I wish. I've done >50 FOIA requests for email communications' metadata across the US and one of the more common rejection reasons is specifically that email addresses are NOT public records. Sure, the domain name is, but that's about it.
  • jstanley 10y ago
    I disagree with your premise, but even if the email address itself were a public record, the connection of the email address to the service that has been breached is not public. This is obvious in cases like the Ashley Madison leak.