Comment by asah
21 hours ago
AFAICT it's impractical to keep residential addresses 100% private/secure - too many ways to get an address from any number of companies, organizations and governments that collect it for various reasons.
Plus numerous ways to infer your address from other data sources, including apps that grab GPS on friends' cellphones when they visit, etc.
Finally, shutting down paid data brokers seems virtually impossible in practice, which means anybody googling you can pay $20 and get everything.
Remember, the issue isn't lazy goodguys but even slightly motivated badguys, who then use third party scripts to do the data collection.
Man, I hate how Wisconsin makes the data not only public, but free.
I bought a house here after a long time out of country and the first year all I got for mail was scam bullshit. Loads of it.
> shutting down paid data brokers seems virtually impossible in practice
Just jail them. Make it a felony to release someone's PII without their written consent, and make data brokers illegal to begin with.
> numerous ways to infer your address from other data sources, including apps that grab GPS on friends' cellphones when they visit
These are not the main vector of transmission of personal information. Yes, Meta could probably do some graph analysis and infer this, but it's a lot of work, and their data leaks are rare in comparison to all the other companies, financial institutions, and governmental organizations, that freely post residential addresses on the internet and to data brokers for the world to Google.
> companies, organizations and governments that collect it for various reasons
KYC requiring addresses should be banned. Companies should not collect a residential address.