There's almost no real privacy online in the US. When I search for my name my phone number and almost every address I've ever lived at it is publicly retrievable - on multiple sites. Even with a private WHOIS I get spam from various companies via my registrar asking to speak to me about making a website.
You can get some of the major sources to remove you with a service like Optery [0]. Costs a few bucks, but if you let them work at it a few months you can drop the subscription and the effects will linger for a while before you start finding yourself on public databases again.
I used it myself and I have trouble finding information about myself, even with my inside knowledge. If someone is determined enough you probably can't really hide from them, especially if they have any connections to law enforcement or one of the big data sinks. But you can definitely make it harder for casuals.
[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/optery
I just can't get myself to pay for this problem that's ultimately a failure of the government and relies on another corporation behaving with my data
fortunately I'm a California resident so looks like that government has passed a solution that's free, thanks for sharing that guys
Here in sweden, personal data such as name, address, income, birth date, personal number, car ownership, etc. is public by design.
I find it interesting how the view on this differs depending on country and what people are used to.
The issue is the spam
All of our personal identification data is available, not by design, but it is available
What kind of spam is that? All my info is available online, but I don't really get much spam. Of course, I get spam to my email but my email address is everywhere (also by design) so that's no wonder.
Its caller spam, this subthread is about a shared American experience of receiving spam calls to our cellphones all day in such volume that many of us route all calls to voicemail automatically.
I think you're misinterpreting it as an obsession over privacy. We are victims of unscrupulous scam caller spam due to a multi tiered failure in how our government implements public utilities, and in the meantime we are chiseling at solutions such as enforcing rules on the data brokers who have our information for lease.
Which seems to be working, for people that pay for services to solve this problem. And California's government is simply doing that same service for free for its residents.
It's worth sitting down for an hour and filing a bunch of information redaction requests.
Might help with phone numbers, but addresses are trivial to find and cannot be removed, if you own property in the United States. Every county publishes property records, searchable by name. Unless you own your house with an LLC, if someone knows or can guess the state you live in, they can 1) search on the property records website of the top 10 counties by population, and if that fails 2) expand to searching other counties until you pop up. Not sure how to mitigate this, other than the LLC method.
There are services that will submit this information to hundreds of sites for you.
I used incogni and it seemed to have a positive result.
https://incogni.com/
Or if you're in California: https://privacy.ca.gov/drop/
Thank you! How’d you find out about this?
It was in the news when it went into effect at the beginning of the year.