I guess we know what he did with all the Government database information he copied.
…area 51 is rich people’s property…
I mean Elon Musk is an asshole but is this really an issue? I mean there were the yellow pages which basically doxxed everyone technically…
Internet Pedantry Alert: That’s the white pages. The yellow pages are for business listings. You could, and still can, opt out of the white pages listings.
It’s shockingly easy to get this sort of information on just about anybody. Many if not most cities and counties have publicly-searchable tax parcel data available on their GIS portals, and quite a few of those include the owner’s name as a searchable field. If you know roughly where somebody lives, odds are pretty good you can find their home address.
I deal with this sort of data a lot for site master-planning studies, and lately I have noticed some cities don’t provide ownership data in the public portal anymore, but you’d be surprised how many still do.
I still find it crazy that those books existed in the first place. When I grew up you only needed a name and you could look it up in the yellow pages to get their phone number and address.
However, where I lived it was possible to opt out from this.
Back in the AOL days, the first iterations of Google had built-in white pages lookup, for everyone, where if you put in a landline phone number you’d get their name and address. One of my first experiences on the internet as a kid was talking people from AOL chatrooms into sending me their phone number, googling it, and sending back their name and address with some nonsense about being from the FBI. Really freaked people out.
