reachability

[totient]

I've been thinking about my net.footprint a bit recently. I have a listed phone number and a 750-entry Google footprint under my real name. And that real name is not exactly a secret; even people who meet me as 'phi' can map that to 'Nicholas Shectman' with an obvious Google search. This is all fine. But spammers make me a bit more possessive with my main email address; my theory is that an actual human will be able to figure it out by finding my real home page (it's in my userinfo, and findable by the dedicated without that) and reasoning that since its URL is of the form http://$DOMAIN/~$USER, my address might be $USER@$DOMAIN.

So far so good, and so I feel I should not be surprised if people I meet take a similar kind of care.

But the application of this practice in the other direction is a little discomfiting. I can take someone's nickname/alias and a scrap of context and have their home address within seconds. Half an hour later I still don't have an email address. And yet using the email address, if I eventually find it, seems like less of an invasion of privacy if I'd like to actually get in touch. What's up with that?

Comments

[paradoox.livejournal.com]

I think the problem is one of spam vs. stalking or electronic harassment vs. physical harassment.

Email seems like less an invasion of privacy than knocking on someone's door (or sending them USmail) because one can't physically harass someone with an email address (and USmail implies you know thee address and can knock on their door). However, I know more than one female friend who came home on a Friday / Saturday night to find someone who thought that he was their boyfriend sitting on their doorstep.

Now on the other hand, the bar for email harassment (or online harassment) is much lower than the bar for physcial harassment. Sending spam is easy. Making snarky comments in someone's LJ or by email is easy.

Whether because the bar is lower or for some other reason, people are more likely to partake in email harassment rather than real harassment. Probably also because real harassment has a good chance of landing you in jail. Email harassment and / or spam doesn't.

Since it is so easy to perform email harassment (and conversly be a victim of email harassment), people try to avoid being a victim of email harassment (usually spam) by trying to keep their email address private. I know a couple of people who almost change their email address on the first piece of spam they get.

However, as I think you are saying, real privacy (rather than email privacy) is probably more imporant. "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names (or spam or email) will never (really) hurt me."

But, real privacy and all privacy is quickly become a joke. I've pretty much given up. If people want to find me, they can. I might somewhat of an effort to have people find me via my cell phone than my landline. Mostly so that people don't call looking for me and annoy my wife. My email address is no big secret either. And one consequence of a short email address is that you get a lot of spam.

In a sense a think the scariest thing I've seen recently is zabasearch. With it (and a town) you can pretty much figure out someone's age. For some reason this strikes me as the start of the slippery slope. I've been pointing this out to people in various job search forums as a reason to stop trying to hide your age in a resume. It's not long before all the HR programs (Brassring et. al.) take the resume and run the name and address thru zabasearch and tag the resume with an age. I know that I run the people I'm going to be interviewing with thru google, zoominfo, and zabasearch.

It's a sad world out there. 1984?