Privacy hacking and public directories
I don’t usually read Smart Money these days, but a privacy-related article popped up in My Yahoo which has some pointers to web sites that you may find yourself or someone you know listed on.
Fundrace.org got some exposure a few months back; it provides an interface for browsing and searching the US Federal Election Committee campaign contribution database from the 2004 presidential race. The site provides some interesting national and regional maps of donors by party. The problematic part for online privacy is that you can search by name, zip code, or get a map with addresses of all the donors in any neighborhood. Everyone who donated between January 1, 2003 and October 13, 2004 and over $200 (and some under $200) is listed, along with their address, title, and employer. I tried queries for various locations here in the Bay Area, L.A., and Malibu, and got listings with many recognizable names, in addition to assorted neighbors. Many of the listings are for office addresses, but a surprising (to me) number of recognizable TV and movie actors turn up on the list with home addresses. They must have good security, a lot of patience, or move frequently.
Another interesting / problematic web site is WhitePages.com, which appears to aggregate telephone directories, and provides the ability to do queries by name, reverse lookup by telephone number, or by address. I tried this on our street, and was pleased to find that neither unlisted phone numbers nor listings without a published street address turn up in the reverse address lookup for our block. This is, of course, the expected behavior for a phone number database built on the published telephone directory, but I was curious whether information might have turned up from some other public source. Cell phone numbers still don’t turn up in these directories either, which makes that a non-issue for now, unless you’re listed in Paris Hilton’s T-mobile Sidekick.
Summary — if you want to keep your address off the internet, don’t use your home address to make a political campaign contribution, and don’t publish your address in the telephone book!
Tags: privacy, mapping, directories
