Ask Lemmy

When I was a kid we had a phone book, it doxxed everyone with a land line.

If you own your home, it's a matter of public record in most states. Hell, I once used to resolve a disagreement my wife and I were having over our neighbor's name. Just looked up the property address on your county assessors website... They list the owners, when the property was last sold, the appraised value and taxes, and a bunch of other stuff.

We called it a phone book.

Welcome to living in Sweden.

With a quick Google search you can find someone’s home address, income, social security number, birthdate, amount of owned vehicles, political work (if any), size of home, criminal record, and much more!

It fucking sucks for it all to be public information, but websites dedicated to collating it all under one roof is even worse.

The nice thing about being a regular person is that very few people have any reason to care.

If you buy something online, the merchant has your name and address. They could come to your house, but why would they?

Seems like a lot of people are unaware of white pages

Sorry but I don't feel any sympathy for celebrities. They gave up the right to privacy the second they started getting free $7000 a bottle wines and iPads for free just because they're famous.

And WTF is up with folks essentially worshipping celebs like Taylor Swift?

In the internet age, it's incredibly easy to look up personal information about people like their address. Sorry, but you likely are easily searchable just like the rest of us.

Here in Sweden you can just google a phone number or a name and get the address, a map of the area, an guide to find the right apartment, the persons gender, how many lives in the home, how many vehicles the person owns, the person's age and birthday, the size of their aprtment, the aproximate value of their home, and more without any cost.

This is normal here, and since everyone is listed we don't really think about it.

That being said, I would be quite annoyed if the press did an article on me where they published my home address...

You mean like the phonebook?

I'm not interesting enough to worry about people being unduly interested in me.

Celebrities could retire into obscurity, go away and be forgotten, nobody would bother them. But they want and NEED to be hounded, stalked, chased and be the center of attention.

The phone book is a thing, you know?

You mean, the phone book?

Their aspiration/ income is directly tied to how popular they are. You can't have both. They have enough money to hide if they please

As I'm not a celebrity, I'm guessing there's quite a few more options than most of us are aware of. One example I could think of is for the celeb to make an LLC and have that LLC buy the house they're living in.

Anyone can google their address and show up/take pictures/lurk/stalk, But thankfully most people would never think to do such a thing nor have any inclination to do so,

I'm sure that nearly all celebrities/public figures, once a certain amount famous, encounter crazy people that they should be fearful of.

How terrifying it must b for celebrities, so they have body guards and a security detail and full-fledged security system at their houses 😥 it’s exhausting thinking about it.

I don't feel bad for them for this part. Its part of the price of being a public figure. I don't know why people wish for fame. Seems like its a mountain of trouble to deal with.

That's why i like Daft punk, no one care about them until they put on the mask.

Am I rich like they are?

Google has a feature where it'll tell you if your personal information shows up in their index and you can request they remove it from being served.

I can say that my personal information has shown up a few times.

Depends on how it went. But I'm well armed, and my location honors the castle doctrine, and my town is right pissy about trespassing.

Back when I first got published, I was dumb enough to do so under my real name.

This has led to a few locals seeing my books are the local library, recognizing the name and finding me. They've all been quite polite, so no big deal.

But the truth is that anyone that showed up causing problems isn't going to have a good time. My neighbors are mostly crazier than I am, and we've all had to show up for each other here and there when someone was acting a fool. So, chances are, whatever idiot it was would get run off long before I had to shoot them.

And, since I know most of the damn town to some degree, including the chief of police and the county sheriff, it isn't like an outsider would even be in town long, unless they enjoy the hospitality of a jail. While the police are a problem overall, the local departments have guys in charge that are trying to fix that to some degree. But not to the degree that some assholes from the internet won't end up being seen doing something they can get charged for.

Jesus, being real, I'm certain my one neighbor would likely kill someone if he saw them taking pictures around here without being warned in advance. He's touchy. He might not start out planning it, but he'd be up in their face, and if they didn't just leave, he would try to make them leave. If they fought back? He's a bit touchy, but a whole lot trained.

But yeah, celebrities don't have that kind of connection to their area like private citizens do, and not every private citizen does either. When I lived in the city, I tried being nice to my neighbors and got outright told to fuck off.

Slightly annoyed and then I'd move. I live moving and I travel light so it wouldn't be a huge inconvenience.

But I agree that it is terrifying and awful for people who prefer to put down roots or have their lifestyle tied up in being public figures.

No celebrity owns the house the live in or stay in. No truly rich person does.

An LLC or more likely a trust owns the house, land, everything they have. And those are owned by other LLCs and Trusts so you can't follow the chain. If someone is doxxed, they go somewhere else. Many places are rented out (think Airbnb) all the time. If you get caught, your agent will "leak" that's just where you were vacationing and the next paparazzi photos will be in different locations on purpose.

Then you do what many do, and buy their real homes in countries that take privacy seriously. When you want an escape, you fly to your real house. No such thing as papparazi, security issues, or anything.

Syndrome says in the incredibles, "when everyone is super, nobody is".

In an ideal world, without stalkers, ad companies, doorstop marketers and selling data, it would be much less of an issue if everyone's addresses were public - there would be nothing special about it since everyone's equally exposed.

In today's world though, I'd be terrified AF!

I wonder how many celebrities go to counselling/therapy, looking at all the horrible things people say online, as well as death threats, creeps etc. Must be miserable

Some random but related food for thought: consider Ebay, Amazon and other marketplaces - you're handing over your address, email and phone number to a random seller (on Ebay this includes your order history, public on your profile) and any one of these could sell your private data onwards, potentially exposing some of your online identity to data brokers for advertising or other malicious purposes. Depending on your threat model, online shopping could be a pretty risky thing to use. Amazon used to also make users' wishlists public by default, not sure if that is still a thing