5 ms·

Death is no escape either - my grandfather died almost thirty years ago but you can still find his name and last address on all of the people search sites. My g

Death is no escape either - my grandfather died almost thirty years ago but you can still find his name and last address on all of the people search sites. My grandmother was still getting marketing materials addressed to him when she died about five years ago. I had an uncle who died in the early 80s and there is no trace of him, so 90s seems to be the point at which the data brokers decided that nobody ever dies. Online advertising is already a sham (no really, I am never ever going to download Homescapes but I see ads for it thirty times a day), add on top of that all the dead people’s data being passed around. There really needs to be some regulation and oversight.

umvi 6y ago
> I had an uncle who died in the early 80s and there is no trace of him Hmm, I wouldn't be so sure. Ancestry, FamilySearch, and other genealogical databases may yet have him in there, along with tons of information that ancestors literally voluntarily supply, including photos (for posterity). I see that as a good thing though. I can learn about my ancestors and see pictures of them and read stories about them.
- CaptArmchair 6y ago
  Historian here. What's on those sites is based off source materials. And those are generally disparate: oral witnesses, family members, documents found in private archives,... but also public records found in your city archives. Where I live, different offices kept population records through out time e.g. city hall, the Church,... You can easily walk in, and access records from the 18th century and figure out when someone was born, who they married to and when they died. However, legal provisions prohibit access to those public records pertaining to births, marriages and deaths which are less then 100 years old. Meaning you don't get access to lists of names of all everyone were born in 1936. Why? Privacy for the living. e.g. someone could walk in and assert that your parents aren't your real parents. Moreover, privacy legislation states that you need consent from living people before you can publish personal information regarding their names, addresses and so on. It means that even if someone passes away, you can't just publish that they were married or about their children if any of those are still alive. Publishing pictures is even more fraught. You need consent from the person depicted, and consent from the photographer. That means ascertaining whether they are still alive, or getting consent from their estate in the case of the photographer. In the latter case, it might mean you may have to wait for 70 years after their death before those pictures enter the public domain. Genealogy websites allowing people to simply upload pictures without constraints expose themselves to copyright liability in that regard. ... and then there's the issue of how those legal provisions are upheld on the Internet. For instance, any ancestry/genealogy site who wants to operate in the EU has to comply with EU legislation including GDPR, copyright, right to be forgotten and so on. For sure, being able to dig into your own ancestry and being able to rely on other people's work through digital technology is awesome. But, as with anything digital, it does come with the same challenges that confront any business case leveraging personal information. TL;DR: Genealogy is fraught with legal challenges. You don't just get to publish, let alone scour and use those data without consent.
ashneo76 6y ago
This. How is HomeScapes not banned for spamming so much??
- 0xy 6y ago
  They're paying for your attention. They should be fined for misrepresenting their game though, because the previews look nothing like the actual game.
  - zxcvbn4038 6y ago
    They are throwing their money away, if I didn’t download the game the first thousand times I don’t know why they think the 1001st time is going to be different. Isn’t that supposed to be the promise of online advertising? Effective targeting? Yet day after day I get ads for homescapes (thousand times no), Harry Potter (nope), rheumatoid arthritis drugs (even trying to target?), cramps (you had 50/50 and you missed), and so on. They might as well be taking ads out in a newspaper (I should not encourage them).
PeterisP 6y ago
The general legal approach is that dead people have no privacy rights, and their privacy tends to be protected only as much as it concerns the privacy and reputation of their surviving relatives. It's fully legal to read and publish the private letters and intimate diaries of historical figures, as it is to make claims about their deeds and motivations that might constitute libel if they were alive.
- m463 6y ago
  it's probably even more fun for people who were legally declared dead, yet were alive elsewhere.
  - sudeepj 6y ago
    This actually is a plot in some movies. How about this for the plot: Witness a high profile crime & then get a witness protection just to avoid getting tracked by FAANG! :)
    - amelius 6y ago
      I bet even then they would be able to track you.
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    Or less fun, as this lady is still struggling to prove she's legally alive having been incorrectly declared legally dead by a court in 2017: https://www.itv.com/news/2021-01-18/woman-ruled-dead-in-2017-by-mistake-in-court-case-fights-to-be-declared-alive https://www.itv.com/news/2021-01-18/woman-ruled-dead-in-2017...
- hilbert42 6y ago
  "It's fully legal to read and publish the private letters and intimate diaries of historical figures" Only if you don't violate the copyright of the dead person - which, depending on the country, can last 50 to 90+ years after the person's death. Thus to publish you'd have to get the right to do so from said person's estate. There are many instances where private correspondence, etc. has been banned from publication/the public domain for this reason.
scruple 6y ago
We still get mail for my deceased father in law. From the state. We've changed addresses 4 times since he passed. It's truly ridiculous.
josephg 6y ago
I read a science fiction book a couple years ago where the main cast of characters paid data services to generate fake digital trails for them. They couldn't erase the real video record of where they were, but they could create fake video records showing them in 6 other locations around the world at the same time. (And browser logs, credit card purchases, chat histories, etc). I wonder if at some point we'll see deep fake profiles being made like that for obfuscation. 40 accounts with my name on facebook, all with similar but different histories and similar but different friends and travel histories. One of them is the real one and the rest deep fakes. Instead of being lost in silence, we can lose ourselves in noise.

umvi 6y ago

> I had an uncle who died in the early 80s and there is no trace of him Hmm, I wouldn't be so sure. Ancestry, FamilySearch, and other genealogical databases may yet have him in there, along with tons of information that ancestors literally voluntarily supply, including photos (for posterity). I see that as a good thing though. I can learn about my ancestors and see pictures of them and read stories about them.

CaptArmchair 6y ago
Historian here. What's on those sites is based off source materials. And those are generally disparate: oral witnesses, family members, documents found in private archives,... but also public records found in your city archives. Where I live, different offices kept population records through out time e.g. city hall, the Church,... You can easily walk in, and access records from the 18th century and figure out when someone was born, who they married to and when they died. However, legal provisions prohibit access to those public records pertaining to births, marriages and deaths which are less then 100 years old. Meaning you don't get access to lists of names of all everyone were born in 1936. Why? Privacy for the living. e.g. someone could walk in and assert that your parents aren't your real parents. Moreover, privacy legislation states that you need consent from living people before you can publish personal information regarding their names, addresses and so on. It means that even if someone passes away, you can't just publish that they were married or about their children if any of those are still alive. Publishing pictures is even more fraught. You need consent from the person depicted, and consent from the photographer. That means ascertaining whether they are still alive, or getting consent from their estate in the case of the photographer. In the latter case, it might mean you may have to wait for 70 years after their death before those pictures enter the public domain. Genealogy websites allowing people to simply upload pictures without constraints expose themselves to copyright liability in that regard. ... and then there's the issue of how those legal provisions are upheld on the Internet. For instance, any ancestry/genealogy site who wants to operate in the EU has to comply with EU legislation including GDPR, copyright, right to be forgotten and so on. For sure, being able to dig into your own ancestry and being able to rely on other people's work through digital technology is awesome. But, as with anything digital, it does come with the same challenges that confront any business case leveraging personal information. TL;DR: Genealogy is fraught with legal challenges. You don't just get to publish, let alone scour and use those data without consent.

ashneo76 6y ago

This. How is HomeScapes not banned for spamming so much??

0xy 6y ago
They're paying for your attention. They should be fined for misrepresenting their game though, because the previews look nothing like the actual game.
- zxcvbn4038 6y ago
  They are throwing their money away, if I didn’t download the game the first thousand times I don’t know why they think the 1001st time is going to be different. Isn’t that supposed to be the promise of online advertising? Effective targeting? Yet day after day I get ads for homescapes (thousand times no), Harry Potter (nope), rheumatoid arthritis drugs (even trying to target?), cramps (you had 50/50 and you missed), and so on. They might as well be taking ads out in a newspaper (I should not encourage them).

PeterisP 6y ago

The general legal approach is that dead people have no privacy rights, and their privacy tends to be protected only as much as it concerns the privacy and reputation of their surviving relatives. It's fully legal to read and publish the private letters and intimate diaries of historical figures, as it is to make claims about their deeds and motivations that might constitute libel if they were alive.

m463 6y ago
it's probably even more fun for people who were legally declared dead, yet were alive elsewhere.
- sudeepj 6y ago
  This actually is a plot in some movies. How about this for the plot: Witness a high profile crime & then get a witness protection just to avoid getting tracked by FAANG! :)
  - amelius 6y ago
    I bet even then they would be able to track you.
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  Or less fun, as this lady is still struggling to prove she's legally alive having been incorrectly declared legally dead by a court in 2017: https://www.itv.com/news/2021-01-18/woman-ruled-dead-in-2017-by-mistake-in-court-case-fights-to-be-declared-alive https://www.itv.com/news/2021-01-18/woman-ruled-dead-in-2017...
hilbert42 6y ago
"It's fully legal to read and publish the private letters and intimate diaries of historical figures" Only if you don't violate the copyright of the dead person - which, depending on the country, can last 50 to 90+ years after the person's death. Thus to publish you'd have to get the right to do so from said person's estate. There are many instances where private correspondence, etc. has been banned from publication/the public domain for this reason.

scruple 6y ago

We still get mail for my deceased father in law. From the state. We've changed addresses 4 times since he passed. It's truly ridiculous.

josephg 6y ago

I read a science fiction book a couple years ago where the main cast of characters paid data services to generate fake digital trails for them. They couldn't erase the real video record of where they were, but they could create fake video records showing them in 6 other locations around the world at the same time. (And browser logs, credit card purchases, chat histories, etc). I wonder if at some point we'll see deep fake profiles being made like that for obfuscation. 40 accounts with my name on facebook, all with similar but different histories and similar but different friends and travel histories. One of them is the real one and the rest deep fakes. Instead of being lost in silence, we can lose ourselves in noise.