5 ms·

This site will be the first stop for anyone wanting to harass another person online. Some times a little friction is a good thing. I love projects like these,

This site will be the first stop for anyone wanting to harass another person online. Some times a little friction is a good thing. I love projects like these, but they're the digital equivalent of "dual use technologies". They can be used for good or evil. That said, nice work.

iqanq 5y ago
>This site will be the first stop for anyone wanting to harass another person online. Some times a little friction is a good thing. Precisely I was thinking of how much fun we'll be having in efnet with this.
- richardbarosky 5y ago
  I think broadly the same tradeoffs exist for any search sysetm, like Google or PACER for example.
rmbyrro 5y ago
Yeah, the only missing piece for fulltext harassment is a "Google alert" for particular keywords. Put the names you wanna track and receive a delightful alert in your inbox with rocks to throw over other people's roof. EDIT: the tech is great, but I think there should be a record of who is accessing the data, for what purpose, terms for how it can be used in a civil way, and means to go after misuse.
- alangibson 5y ago
  How is harassment as a service not a thing yet? You get a "Google alert" for your target. The service presents you with several buttons: 1. Send an AI written email 2. Post a link to the new info on their Facebook page 3. Tweet an image macro with the incriminating text embedded @ them
  - sockpuppet69 5y ago
  - inetknght 5y ago
    > How is harassment as a service not a thing yet? What makes you think it isn't?
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    It is a thing, but making it so easy to find and access court documents mentioning someone's name will add to the pile of rocks malevolent people can throw at anyone.
ghaff 5y ago
There's a whole lot of information that the collective "we" decided to make public for various reasons. But those decisions making things public were in the context of the information being in some dusty town, county, or state office somewhere. With more and more of that information being digital, we've more or less punted of the question whether all that information should still be public. Overall, more transparency is probably good but, as you say, it's not an unalloyed good as most of this information will live forever and be cheap/easy to access.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
Given that one third of Americans have criminal records of one sort or another, so that somebody almost certainly has a criminal in their family or near circle of friends, I suppose criminality is about the same as finding out somebody watches porn. on edit: actually one third is probably overstating but close.
thr0wawayf00 5y ago
> I love projects like these, but they're the digital equivalent of "dual use technologies". They can be used for good or evil. Isn't pretty much every technology "dual use"? Just look at social media. You need a platform that gives you the ability to harass someone in order to actually do it. > Some times a little friction is a good thing. We as a market repeatedly justify the frictionless experience of being spied on for ads in ways that we have little to no control over, but we're gonna deny ourselves the frictionless experience of being able to see public records because we're worried about our privacy?
duped 5y ago
I tried some rather specific queries of things I know to should return some records and it was fairly useless, so I'm not terribly worried. Just anecdotally, I have a fairly uncommon last name but common first name, I know what states/counties I have appeared in court in and couldn't find any of the records. If you search something like <name> <county> <state> the results are overloaded with <county> <state>, for example.
vintermann 5y ago
On the other hand, powerful people who wanted to harass you or hurt you have had access like this for a long time. It's how I feel about facial recognition technology or other ML-based technology too. The worst people who could ever have access to it, already had access to it. Giving everyone access to it is just leveling the field.
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  I'd love a world where the "powerless" have the same ability to leverage surveillance as the "powerful". I'd love it if we could achieve that balance by eliminating surveillance, but I don't see that as a realistic outcome (at least initially). In the absence of eliminating surveillance I'll take full public transparency. Maybe such transparency would even drive the elimination of surveillance.

iqanq 5y ago

>This site will be the first stop for anyone wanting to harass another person online. Some times a little friction is a good thing. Precisely I was thinking of how much fun we'll be having in efnet with this.

richardbarosky 5y ago
I think broadly the same tradeoffs exist for any search sysetm, like Google or PACER for example.

rmbyrro 5y ago

Yeah, the only missing piece for fulltext harassment is a "Google alert" for particular keywords. Put the names you wanna track and receive a delightful alert in your inbox with rocks to throw over other people's roof. EDIT: the tech is great, but I think there should be a record of who is accessing the data, for what purpose, terms for how it can be used in a civil way, and means to go after misuse.

alangibson 5y ago
How is harassment as a service not a thing yet? You get a "Google alert" for your target. The service presents you with several buttons: 1. Send an AI written email 2. Post a link to the new info on their Facebook page 3. Tweet an image macro with the incriminating text embedded @ them
- sockpuppet69 5y ago
- inetknght 5y ago
  > How is harassment as a service not a thing yet? What makes you think it isn't?
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  It is a thing, but making it so easy to find and access court documents mentioning someone's name will add to the pile of rocks malevolent people can throw at anyone.

ghaff 5y ago

There's a whole lot of information that the collective "we" decided to make public for various reasons. But those decisions making things public were in the context of the information being in some dusty town, county, or state office somewhere. With more and more of that information being digital, we've more or less punted of the question whether all that information should still be public. Overall, more transparency is probably good but, as you say, it's not an unalloyed good as most of this information will live forever and be cheap/easy to access.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

Given that one third of Americans have criminal records of one sort or another, so that somebody almost certainly has a criminal in their family or near circle of friends, I suppose criminality is about the same as finding out somebody watches porn. on edit: actually one third is probably overstating but close.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago

> I love projects like these, but they're the digital equivalent of "dual use technologies". They can be used for good or evil. Isn't pretty much every technology "dual use"? Just look at social media. You need a platform that gives you the ability to harass someone in order to actually do it. > Some times a little friction is a good thing. We as a market repeatedly justify the frictionless experience of being spied on for ads in ways that we have little to no control over, but we're gonna deny ourselves the frictionless experience of being able to see public records because we're worried about our privacy?

duped 5y ago

I tried some rather specific queries of things I know to should return some records and it was fairly useless, so I'm not terribly worried. Just anecdotally, I have a fairly uncommon last name but common first name, I know what states/counties I have appeared in court in and couldn't find any of the records. If you search something like <name> <county> <state> the results are overloaded with <county> <state>, for example.

vintermann 5y ago

On the other hand, powerful people who wanted to harass you or hurt you have had access like this for a long time. It's how I feel about facial recognition technology or other ML-based technology too. The worst people who could ever have access to it, already had access to it. Giving everyone access to it is just leveling the field.

EvanAnderson 5y ago
I'd love a world where the "powerless" have the same ability to leverage surveillance as the "powerful". I'd love it if we could achieve that balance by eliminating surveillance, but I don't see that as a realistic outcome (at least initially). In the absence of eliminating surveillance I'll take full public transparency. Maybe such transparency would even drive the elimination of surveillance.