I just found out via Dave Farber's IP list that if you type your phone number into Google, 510-843-0610, you get a reverse directory listing with your name and address, if you have divulged such to the phone company. This is another example of how technology is changing the boundaries of our privacy, and how a difference in degree can also be a difference in quality. Reverse phone directories have been available to businesses for many years, but they were not particularly advertised or easy to get. Now anyone on the planet can find out a lot about me from my phone number. Security experts scoff at security through obscurity, because the obscurity often conceals flaws in the security, and because a determined person can almost always penetrate the obscurity, but they forget that our social interactions often rely on obscurity to create boundaries. Usually, when we give people our phone numbers we don't assume that we are giving them our home addresses as well. Now we are.
Google does provide a fairly painless, although not well advertised, page that lets you opt-out, but unless you know the feature exists, you aren't likely to opt out. I wonder why Google is willing to take the PR hit it will get for this?
Posted by Geodog at March 25, 2003 12:22 AM | TrackBackMy apologies, but my web hoster has turned off commenting, due to a flood of obscene spam bringing the server to its knees. I hope to have this weblog transitioned over to Wordpress in the near future, so that I can have commenting up and working again. Until then, please feel free to send me your comments via my email contact form.. Please ignore everything below this comment.
Hmm. I saw this earlier on IP as well, but I don't see what the big deal is. This has been around for a while. Hell, even my WebTV using grandparents sent me a note asking if it was bad a few months ago.
I don't see how it's any different than any of the reverse phone directories that have been online for years. Your phone number (if listed) is public information. What's wrong with providing an easy way to look it up?
Posted by: Mike Masnick on March 25, 2003 01:16 AMI don't necessarily see anything wrong with it, although I would like to see people given more choice about it, but that is a general opinion about data privacy, not specific to this instance.
I wrote about it because it is an example of how technology is nibbling away at our privacy, and changing the social conventions that we live with. Not because we willed it as a society, but because a couple of smart engineers figured out how to make it possible.
Indeed, it is for this reason that pretty much all savvy young people give acquaintances and dates/prospective-dates their E-MAIL address (and often a disposable, temporary one at that) instead of their phone number.
For every privacy-intruding tool, there's a quickly adapted privacy-protecting measure :)
Posted by: Adam Lasnik on March 25, 2003 03:12 AM