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Two sources of personal information leaks that are difficult to counteract are voter registration and USPS change of address, both of which are publicly availab

Two sources of personal information leaks that are difficult to counteract are voter registration and USPS change of address, both of which are publicly available. In the case of voter registration, as soon as I updated my phone number last year, I went from no spam to getting dozens of SMS spam message per day. About 80% of it was political but the other 20% is the standard scam spam. The political spam mostly ended after the election (there's sometimes fund raising pleas) but the scam stuff continues on. The USPS change of address information quickly ends up on all of those "Your Life" type sites. It's frustrating that such basic government functions end up making it easier for others to track and prey on you.

ghaff 5y ago
There are good reasons a lot of things have historically been public records. Some of the reasons look less good on balance when those records can be instantly copied, data mined, and linked to any number of other digital records.
- Sanzig 5y ago
  I think one potential solution is to put a small financial barrier in the way of access to a public record. Say it costs a few bucks to view a record (depends on the sensitivity, but maybe $5-10). This won't deter people who are doing records searches for reasonable purposes (lawyers, journalists, curious citizens) since the amount of money to look at a handful of records is basically negligible, but for so-called "people search" websites having to pay $5 per record completely kills the business model.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    That's sort of already the case. $25 or so can give you access to a lot more information than you'll get from a casual Google. A lot of this used to be more generally available but I think it's mostly behind paywalls at this point which I don't think is entirely a bad thing. But people can reasonably disagree on what should be readily available to everyone and what should take some more effort/money.
    - Sanzig 5y ago
      My suggestion is to put the financial barrier at the government-industry interface, not at the industry-consumer interface. Right now a lot of brokers slurp up huge amounts of information from freely-available but generally not indexed public government databases (land title registries, voter rolls, etc) and collate them. They then charge fees to consumers for access. Requiring anyone who wants a government record to pay a small fee to the government for each record would cut that business model off at the knees.
  - mindslight 5y ago
    Without a general right to control data about you, this just makes things worse. Doing this naively means the surveillance companies pay the one time cost of buying the records, and then use/copy/propagate them freely. $5 for everyone in the US is $1.6 billion, which isn't cheap but it's also not out of the scope of how surveillance companies operate. Also the cost just needs to be paid by the industry as a whole rather than each company - data brokers would spend $5 on a record, and then turn around and sell copies of it for $2 ea to 4 different companies. Meanwhile, not being able to see the contents without paying keeps the public's own awareness down. No, the right answer is to give individuals the right to control information that is stored about them ala the GDPR. Companies should serve us individuals, not vice versa. Make it so what the surveillance industry is doing is clearly illegal, and force the shady operators to retreat to the shadows rather than being respected market leaders.
    - Sanzig 5y ago
      I agree that GDPR-style privacy legislation is the ultimate solution, but unfortunately due to the international nature of the internet that sort of legislation will have difficulties until at least (1) the USA passes some sort of GDPR-style federal legislation, and possibly (2) GDPR-style privacy protections become part of international treaties going forward.

ghaff 5y ago

There are good reasons a lot of things have historically been public records. Some of the reasons look less good on balance when those records can be instantly copied, data mined, and linked to any number of other digital records.

Sanzig 5y ago
I think one potential solution is to put a small financial barrier in the way of access to a public record. Say it costs a few bucks to view a record (depends on the sensitivity, but maybe $5-10). This won't deter people who are doing records searches for reasonable purposes (lawyers, journalists, curious citizens) since the amount of money to look at a handful of records is basically negligible, but for so-called "people search" websites having to pay $5 per record completely kills the business model.
- ghaff 5y ago
  That's sort of already the case. $25 or so can give you access to a lot more information than you'll get from a casual Google. A lot of this used to be more generally available but I think it's mostly behind paywalls at this point which I don't think is entirely a bad thing. But people can reasonably disagree on what should be readily available to everyone and what should take some more effort/money.
  - Sanzig 5y ago
    My suggestion is to put the financial barrier at the government-industry interface, not at the industry-consumer interface. Right now a lot of brokers slurp up huge amounts of information from freely-available but generally not indexed public government databases (land title registries, voter rolls, etc) and collate them. They then charge fees to consumers for access. Requiring anyone who wants a government record to pay a small fee to the government for each record would cut that business model off at the knees.
- mindslight 5y ago
  Without a general right to control data about you, this just makes things worse. Doing this naively means the surveillance companies pay the one time cost of buying the records, and then use/copy/propagate them freely. $5 for everyone in the US is $1.6 billion, which isn't cheap but it's also not out of the scope of how surveillance companies operate. Also the cost just needs to be paid by the industry as a whole rather than each company - data brokers would spend $5 on a record, and then turn around and sell copies of it for $2 ea to 4 different companies. Meanwhile, not being able to see the contents without paying keeps the public's own awareness down. No, the right answer is to give individuals the right to control information that is stored about them ala the GDPR. Companies should serve us individuals, not vice versa. Make it so what the surveillance industry is doing is clearly illegal, and force the shady operators to retreat to the shadows rather than being respected market leaders.
  - Sanzig 5y ago
    I agree that GDPR-style privacy legislation is the ultimate solution, but unfortunately due to the international nature of the internet that sort of legislation will have difficulties until at least (1) the USA passes some sort of GDPR-style federal legislation, and possibly (2) GDPR-style privacy protections become part of international treaties going forward.