dreamshark: (Default)
[personal profile] dreamshark
Gosh, I remember when my phone number was available to anybody with a phone book. Which was everybody with a phone. 

Man, that's a blast from the past. Remember phone books? 

Date: 2022-11-17 02:58 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] quadong
As I will never tire of pointing out, it baffles me that people now think that phone numbers and home addresses are secrets that must be carefully guarded.

I mean, I guess there's been a real change in how phones work, so that part makes some little bit of sense. But considering your postal address to be a secret is what really confuses me.

Date: 2022-11-17 05:09 pm (UTC)
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
From: [personal profile] mdlbear

You might want to reconsider that the next time you receive a death threat online. There have always been people who have a good reason for wanting an unlisted number.

Date: 2022-11-17 08:04 pm (UTC)
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
From: [personal profile] mdlbear

Yes. Not recently, but it was disturbing. There have been more recent incidents among people close to me, including my housemate of a year ago.

Check on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ to see what information of yours has been revealed in data breaches; and https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords to check passwords.

Another reason to be cautious is the amount of spam, phishing, etc. these days -- Your address and phone number are public information, but if they're in a spammer's database they're much more likely to get used.

Date: 2022-11-19 07:04 pm (UTC)
minnehaha: (Default)
From: [personal profile] minnehaha
Paste a password into some random web site to see if it is in a data breach? Seems like a super dumb idea to me. Just change your passwords regularly.

K.

Date: 2022-11-19 09:04 pm (UTC)
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
From: [personal profile] mdlbear

Read the docs on the site -- the protocol for checking is pretty secure. And the site has been around for several years and has a good reputation.

Date: 2022-11-17 07:08 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] quadong
What Sharon said. I'm not denying that some people have reasons to hide their contact information, but most people's contact information doesn't need to be hidden, and is not hidden, even if they think it is. For instance, if you own a house, your address is available through the property records. If I type my name or Sharon's into whitepages.com, roughly correct information comes up (in my case, it's out of date, but will probably catch up soon), and that's not through anything nefarious. And I don't even own a house.

Date: 2022-11-17 08:07 pm (UTC)
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
From: [personal profile] mdlbear

Voter records, also. Which is why my former housemate moved to a different state without telling me which one.

Date: 2022-11-17 08:20 pm (UTC)
From: [personal profile] quadong
Um, ok, well, I have no idea what the situation between you and your ex-housemate was. I guess you didn't part on the best of terms. I hope that if they didn't want you to know where they went, you also didn't think you needed to know, in which case there's no further problem.

Date: 2022-11-17 09:28 pm (UTC)
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
From: [personal profile] mdlbear

Not quite -- I was the one who didn't want to know where they went, so that they couldn't be found through me.

I'm way too easy to find -- I've been on the internet since before there was a world wide web, and long before the web had scary places in it.

Date: 2022-11-19 07:01 pm (UTC)
minnehaha: (Default)
From: [personal profile] minnehaha
How do you know your phone number was found on the Dark Web?

K.

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