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One of the "pranks" we play on expats moving to Sweden is to look them up on hitta.se, take a screenshot and send it back to them saying "this you?". They alway

One of the "pranks" we play on expats moving to Sweden is to look them up on hitta.se, take a screenshot and send it back to them saying "this you?". They always freak out and with reason, these sites contain an obscene amount of personal information about you. Some of them even give you people's salary history, which is slightly harder to obtain but also totally legal. The weirdest thing I thought is that most Swedes don't think this is weird. Even if the country is overall safe I can think of a trillion ways in which you could ruin someone's life with this data.

soco 4y ago
The question is, out of those trillion ways, how many actually happened? This Swedish info is actually public since quite a while, and I have yet to hear of lives destroyed. I'm not saying it cannot be, just that I didn't hear.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  This makes me wonder why ordinary people are not swatted, police called on them, deliveries made in their name, etc. in Sweden when a country that doesn't have such public records like USA has this so regularly several people have died.
  - tokai 4y ago
    Swatting works in USA because of how the police handle it. In Sweden, and in most of the world, you would get a knock on the door and some questions from two policemen. US police going in blind no-knock raids with weapons hot on the basis of a single anonymous phone call is the issue, not public addresses.
    - growup66 4y ago
    - notch656a 4y ago
      Does Sweden have something like CPS? In America, if someone discovers you have a child they can make repeated allegation to CPS. CPS is required to investigate and they're also required by law to not disclose who reported it. So having your name in a book with any evidence you have children allows anyone to harrass you endlessly, each time you'll be under investigation for weeks to months and you can never find out who's causing it.
      - pazx 4y ago
        Sweden has an its version of CPS. The first time they will do an investigation but without any proof, nothing will happen. After a few of these without any indication of harm being done to the child they will just ignore them as it has been investigated. You can’t really cause problems for people this way.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      And blaming swatting on swatters is an obvious trick. To prevent swatting, we have a choice of changing our expectations about how police should react to anonymous snitching, or we can detect and isolate or eliminate every single extremely maladjusted young man that has existed or will exist. Choosing the first means that you end swatting as a danger. You're only ever pretending to choose the second (the impossible one); but instead you're actually saying that the status quo is fine and in addition you're going to use maladjusted young males as a pretense to take even more liberties with the amount of force and restriction that you're going to apply to the general public.
  - ClassyJacket 4y ago
    Swatting doesn't work in any other country than America because in any other country than America, the police won't immediately murder someone based on a phone call.
    - adventured 4y ago
      Swatting rarely results in murder in the US, and obviously it makes the news when it does. It's largely an effective harrassment, terrorization (fear) tactic. Congressperson Marjorie Greene (yes she's terrible, not the point) being an on-going example of that.
      - cassianoleal 4y ago
        > Swatting rarely results in murder in the US, and obviously it makes the news when it does. I don't think this is as much of a counter-argument as you seem to think.
    - bhelkey 4y ago
      > Swatting doesn't work in any other country than America because in any other country than America A Twitch streamer was swatted in the UK [1]. [1] https://www.shacknews.com/article/131816/twitch-streamer-keffals-arrested-during-swatting-incident https://www.shacknews.com/article/131816/twitch-streamer-kef...
      - Symbiote 4y ago
        That's London in Canada.
      - ghusbands 4y ago
        > A Twitch streamer was swatted in the UK It says "Canadian" in the headline and throughout the article. Still a country other than America, but not the UK.
        OJFord 4y ago
        But also the most similar country there is to the USA.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Stalking is ridiculously common everywhere and there's no reason to think it isn't in sweden as well. If no one you know has experienced it, or felt safe enough to confide in you, that still means nothing to everyone else. "What has soco heard about" is not a meaningful metric of anything.
- joshspankit 4y ago
  > public since quite a while... I think this is an interesting point. If you were to suddenly flip a switch and have all US data exposed the same way, I think there would be chaos and maybe even violence. But I think that speaks more negatively to the current state of America than it does the idea of having information be public.
  - YetAnotherNick 4y ago
    Can you describe why it will create violence? I could maybe understand that it could makes employment harder for some group or something, but how does it lead to violence.
    - rixthefox 4y ago
      Violence because some Americans just cannot be trusted with public data. My biggest complaint about living in the US, being a natural born citizen, is that most people seem to make everything about themselves and this is partially the problem. All of this information being publicly available isn't the problem, it's that most people don't know how to leave well enough alone and think that just because they have this information that they need to act on it and use it to their advantage. Likewise, you have the people who simply have no self-control and will fly off the handle and do something without knowing all the pieces and just assume they have heard enough to make up their mind. They would use that information to hurt their perceived enemies because in their messed up echo chamber if you're not Male, White, Christian, and Heterosexual then you're the wrong kind of American. The current issues surrounding abortion and women's rights only reinforce that mindset. These people label those differences as an "illness" and all that virtue signalling to make you feel like you're wrong if you believe otherwise.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      Response to a deleted comment: > Extralegal punishments like "cancelling", doxxing, and indirectly inciting violence on your political adversaries is becoming more common. > And when that happens, it's understandable why the target above would want to get the person back with their own (possibly kinetic) extralegal punishment, if they can't take it through the court system, which is what already happens for people like drug dealers (they can't go through court system to fix bad deals). > You also just have crazy people. "Talk shit, get hit" etc. You're absolutely right. Vigilantism is a serious problem, and dressing it up as political activism is becoming increasingly common. You can't even avoid this by simply believing and saying the "correct" things because half the country is going to disagree with you regardless. In such an environment, anonymity is the best defense. Either you blend in with the crowd and never say anything interesting, hope that nobody ever singles you out for retaliation, or you cloak yourself in anonymity and speak your mind. The latter is something of an American tradition, born in a time of revolutionary strife when being on the wrong side could get you dead, imprisoned, or chased out of the country. Aside: don't take downvotes so seriously. Sometimes good comments get hit with a lot of downvotes at first but get upvoted again later. Also they don't matter, the 'karma' is imaginary internet points and you can't buy anything with them. Ignore downvotes and speak your mind.
- mikrl 4y ago
  I’m sure there is at least one 4channer or serious cybercriminal reading this page and learning something they didn’t know before. Then again, am I the crazy one for shredding my mail? Maybe I should scan it and put it all on my GitHub.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
I think Sweden is/was a very high trust society. People knew their fellow Swedes, many times with family links going back generations. There are a lot of things you can do in a high trust society, that do not work in a society without that level of trust - for example, generous welfare benefits where you trust your neighbors not to exploit the system.
- rgrieselhuber 4y ago
  What has, in your opinion, contributed to an overall loss of trust in societies where it once was higher?
  - sillysaurusx 4y ago
    The sheer number of people. 7% of all humans who have ever lived are alive today.
    - moffkalast 4y ago
      And the only human you can truly trust after all is a dead one.
      - scintill76 4y ago
        So I can trust 93% of all humans who have ever lived – impressive!
  - jwond 4y ago
    Some studies have found a negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust [1], but it is difficult to have discussions about this since it is such a sensitive topic. And of course it is not the only factor. [1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=por-it0AAAAJ&citation_for_view=por-it0AAAAJ:LPZeul_q3PIC https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
GekkePrutser 4y ago
I don't understand how you don't revolt against this to be honest. And in terms of 'safe', didn't the extreme right just win big because the mainstream parties totally ignore the uptick in organized violent crime? At least that's what they said in the news here, perhaps it's not fully accurate. I understand state agencies might want to see personal data, though I often don't agree. Having it available for anyone to see certainly would not make me feel safer. But anyway I will never live in Sweden anyway. If the Swedish are happy with this, so be it. I just find it hard to understand.
- cpach 4y ago
  “At least that's what they said in the news here, perhaps it's not fully accurate.” IMHO it’s pretty accurate unfortunately.
- puglr 4y ago
  Based on my observations from having Swedish friends and spending time in Sweden, a lot of the rise of the extreme right there can be directly attributed to the tensions resulting from the Syrian refugee crisis. The last time I was in Sweden, ordinary folks were expressing ideas like "well maybe not everyone deserves free healthcare". Like many western nations, economic opportunities and quality of social services is dipping. Standard practice for right wing parties to blame immigrants (or refugees, etc.).
  - jwond 4y ago
    > Standard practice for right wing parties to blame immigrants (or refugees, etc.). On the flip side, standard practice for left wing parties is to deny that immigration causes any problems at all and call you racist for even trying to discuss it. However, as we are seeing in Sweden, sometimes the problems become too big to ignore.
    - swooni 4y ago
      People aren't just "trying to discuss it". Plenty of outright racism in Sweden.
onetimeusename 4y ago
Do you get a lot of scam calls? In the US this is a problem, I think most of the calls just use telephony software to automate and brute force every possible number. They spoof the originating phone number but they 99.9% likelihood are coming from another country with call centers like India or the Philippines. If you can access every Swedish citizen's data, this could be attractive for scammers especially if you want to target elderly people. What about automated calls in general and spam?
- Nullabillity 4y ago
  Fully automated robocalls are… just not a thing here. There are some phone salespeople but personally I don't think I've got more than a single digit amount of calls per year.
- drakonka 4y ago
  I don't think phone numbers are quite _as_ searchable as other information. I get fewer spam calls here than I did in Australia. A few years ago a phone provider called me and actually offered a really good mobile deal, which I'm still on. Another time I had some kind of survey company call. I think there's been a couple more over the last decade, but it's a rare occurrence. Re scam calls - luckily never gotten one of those in Sweden or elsewhere.
- ksidudwbw 4y ago
  The ability to spoof in the phone system is so stupid. Someone was spoofing being the police here
- DavidVoid 4y ago
  I don't think I've ever gotten a spam call. I used to get the occasional telemarketer call, but I added my number to the NIX-registry (Do Not Call Registry) a few years ago and I've only gotten one marketing call since then. Regulations around telemarketing are pretty strict here. I did report the one call I got and I got a follow-up email a few weeks later explaining what had happened (the company doing the marketing had experienced a technical glitch [1]). [1] https://nixnamnden.se/2020/10/20-196-20-197-20-198-20-199-20-200-20-201-20-202-20-203-20-204-20-205-20-206 https://nixnamnden.se/2020/10/20-196-20-197-20-198-20-199-20...

soco 4y ago

The question is, out of those trillion ways, how many actually happened? This Swedish info is actually public since quite a while, and I have yet to hear of lives destroyed. I'm not saying it cannot be, just that I didn't hear.

PuppyTailWags 4y ago
This makes me wonder why ordinary people are not swatted, police called on them, deliveries made in their name, etc. in Sweden when a country that doesn't have such public records like USA has this so regularly several people have died.
- tokai 4y ago
  Swatting works in USA because of how the police handle it. In Sweden, and in most of the world, you would get a knock on the door and some questions from two policemen. US police going in blind no-knock raids with weapons hot on the basis of a single anonymous phone call is the issue, not public addresses.
  - growup66 4y ago
  - notch656a 4y ago
    Does Sweden have something like CPS? In America, if someone discovers you have a child they can make repeated allegation to CPS. CPS is required to investigate and they're also required by law to not disclose who reported it. So having your name in a book with any evidence you have children allows anyone to harrass you endlessly, each time you'll be under investigation for weeks to months and you can never find out who's causing it.
    - pazx 4y ago
      Sweden has an its version of CPS. The first time they will do an investigation but without any proof, nothing will happen. After a few of these without any indication of harm being done to the child they will just ignore them as it has been investigated. You can’t really cause problems for people this way.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    And blaming swatting on swatters is an obvious trick. To prevent swatting, we have a choice of changing our expectations about how police should react to anonymous snitching, or we can detect and isolate or eliminate every single extremely maladjusted young man that has existed or will exist. Choosing the first means that you end swatting as a danger. You're only ever pretending to choose the second (the impossible one); but instead you're actually saying that the status quo is fine and in addition you're going to use maladjusted young males as a pretense to take even more liberties with the amount of force and restriction that you're going to apply to the general public.
- ClassyJacket 4y ago
  Swatting doesn't work in any other country than America because in any other country than America, the police won't immediately murder someone based on a phone call.
  - adventured 4y ago
    Swatting rarely results in murder in the US, and obviously it makes the news when it does. It's largely an effective harrassment, terrorization (fear) tactic. Congressperson Marjorie Greene (yes she's terrible, not the point) being an on-going example of that.
    - cassianoleal 4y ago
      > Swatting rarely results in murder in the US, and obviously it makes the news when it does. I don't think this is as much of a counter-argument as you seem to think.
  - bhelkey 4y ago
    > Swatting doesn't work in any other country than America because in any other country than America A Twitch streamer was swatted in the UK [1]. [1] https://www.shacknews.com/article/131816/twitch-streamer-keffals-arrested-during-swatting-incident https://www.shacknews.com/article/131816/twitch-streamer-kef...
    - Symbiote 4y ago
      That's London in Canada.
    - ghusbands 4y ago
      > A Twitch streamer was swatted in the UK It says "Canadian" in the headline and throughout the article. Still a country other than America, but not the UK.
      - OJFord 4y ago
        But also the most similar country there is to the USA.
giraffe_lady 4y ago
Stalking is ridiculously common everywhere and there's no reason to think it isn't in sweden as well. If no one you know has experienced it, or felt safe enough to confide in you, that still means nothing to everyone else. "What has soco heard about" is not a meaningful metric of anything.
joshspankit 4y ago
> public since quite a while... I think this is an interesting point. If you were to suddenly flip a switch and have all US data exposed the same way, I think there would be chaos and maybe even violence. But I think that speaks more negatively to the current state of America than it does the idea of having information be public.
- YetAnotherNick 4y ago
  Can you describe why it will create violence? I could maybe understand that it could makes employment harder for some group or something, but how does it lead to violence.
  - rixthefox 4y ago
    Violence because some Americans just cannot be trusted with public data. My biggest complaint about living in the US, being a natural born citizen, is that most people seem to make everything about themselves and this is partially the problem. All of this information being publicly available isn't the problem, it's that most people don't know how to leave well enough alone and think that just because they have this information that they need to act on it and use it to their advantage. Likewise, you have the people who simply have no self-control and will fly off the handle and do something without knowing all the pieces and just assume they have heard enough to make up their mind. They would use that information to hurt their perceived enemies because in their messed up echo chamber if you're not Male, White, Christian, and Heterosexual then you're the wrong kind of American. The current issues surrounding abortion and women's rights only reinforce that mindset. These people label those differences as an "illness" and all that virtue signalling to make you feel like you're wrong if you believe otherwise.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    Response to a deleted comment: > Extralegal punishments like "cancelling", doxxing, and indirectly inciting violence on your political adversaries is becoming more common. > And when that happens, it's understandable why the target above would want to get the person back with their own (possibly kinetic) extralegal punishment, if they can't take it through the court system, which is what already happens for people like drug dealers (they can't go through court system to fix bad deals). > You also just have crazy people. "Talk shit, get hit" etc. You're absolutely right. Vigilantism is a serious problem, and dressing it up as political activism is becoming increasingly common. You can't even avoid this by simply believing and saying the "correct" things because half the country is going to disagree with you regardless. In such an environment, anonymity is the best defense. Either you blend in with the crowd and never say anything interesting, hope that nobody ever singles you out for retaliation, or you cloak yourself in anonymity and speak your mind. The latter is something of an American tradition, born in a time of revolutionary strife when being on the wrong side could get you dead, imprisoned, or chased out of the country. Aside: don't take downvotes so seriously. Sometimes good comments get hit with a lot of downvotes at first but get upvoted again later. Also they don't matter, the 'karma' is imaginary internet points and you can't buy anything with them. Ignore downvotes and speak your mind.
mikrl 4y ago
I’m sure there is at least one 4channer or serious cybercriminal reading this page and learning something they didn’t know before. Then again, am I the crazy one for shredding my mail? Maybe I should scan it and put it all on my GitHub.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

I think Sweden is/was a very high trust society. People knew their fellow Swedes, many times with family links going back generations. There are a lot of things you can do in a high trust society, that do not work in a society without that level of trust - for example, generous welfare benefits where you trust your neighbors not to exploit the system.

rgrieselhuber 4y ago
What has, in your opinion, contributed to an overall loss of trust in societies where it once was higher?
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  The sheer number of people. 7% of all humans who have ever lived are alive today.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    And the only human you can truly trust after all is a dead one.
    - scintill76 4y ago
      So I can trust 93% of all humans who have ever lived – impressive!
- jwond 4y ago
  Some studies have found a negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust [1], but it is difficult to have discussions about this since it is such a sensitive topic. And of course it is not the only factor. [1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=por-it0AAAAJ&citation_for_view=por-it0AAAAJ:LPZeul_q3PIC https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

GekkePrutser 4y ago

I don't understand how you don't revolt against this to be honest. And in terms of 'safe', didn't the extreme right just win big because the mainstream parties totally ignore the uptick in organized violent crime? At least that's what they said in the news here, perhaps it's not fully accurate. I understand state agencies might want to see personal data, though I often don't agree. Having it available for anyone to see certainly would not make me feel safer. But anyway I will never live in Sweden anyway. If the Swedish are happy with this, so be it. I just find it hard to understand.

cpach 4y ago
“At least that's what they said in the news here, perhaps it's not fully accurate.” IMHO it’s pretty accurate unfortunately.
puglr 4y ago
Based on my observations from having Swedish friends and spending time in Sweden, a lot of the rise of the extreme right there can be directly attributed to the tensions resulting from the Syrian refugee crisis. The last time I was in Sweden, ordinary folks were expressing ideas like "well maybe not everyone deserves free healthcare". Like many western nations, economic opportunities and quality of social services is dipping. Standard practice for right wing parties to blame immigrants (or refugees, etc.).
- jwond 4y ago
  > Standard practice for right wing parties to blame immigrants (or refugees, etc.). On the flip side, standard practice for left wing parties is to deny that immigration causes any problems at all and call you racist for even trying to discuss it. However, as we are seeing in Sweden, sometimes the problems become too big to ignore.
  - swooni 4y ago
    People aren't just "trying to discuss it". Plenty of outright racism in Sweden.

onetimeusename 4y ago

Do you get a lot of scam calls? In the US this is a problem, I think most of the calls just use telephony software to automate and brute force every possible number. They spoof the originating phone number but they 99.9% likelihood are coming from another country with call centers like India or the Philippines. If you can access every Swedish citizen's data, this could be attractive for scammers especially if you want to target elderly people. What about automated calls in general and spam?

Nullabillity 4y ago
Fully automated robocalls are… just not a thing here. There are some phone salespeople but personally I don't think I've got more than a single digit amount of calls per year.
drakonka 4y ago
I don't think phone numbers are quite _as_ searchable as other information. I get fewer spam calls here than I did in Australia. A few years ago a phone provider called me and actually offered a really good mobile deal, which I'm still on. Another time I had some kind of survey company call. I think there's been a couple more over the last decade, but it's a rare occurrence. Re scam calls - luckily never gotten one of those in Sweden or elsewhere.
ksidudwbw 4y ago
The ability to spoof in the phone system is so stupid. Someone was spoofing being the police here
DavidVoid 4y ago
I don't think I've ever gotten a spam call. I used to get the occasional telemarketer call, but I added my number to the NIX-registry (Do Not Call Registry) a few years ago and I've only gotten one marketing call since then. Regulations around telemarketing are pretty strict here. I did report the one call I got and I got a follow-up email a few weeks later explaining what had happened (the company doing the marketing had experienced a technical glitch [1]). [1] https://nixnamnden.se/2020/10/20-196-20-197-20-198-20-199-20-200-20-201-20-202-20-203-20-204-20-205-20-206 https://nixnamnden.se/2020/10/20-196-20-197-20-198-20-199-20...