There's a little-known world of commercial services like Rapleaf that give marketers information from a list of email addresses. I wrote a test service to show you what information's available on your address:
The scary thing is that if they can get your full name and rough location, it's then often possible to get a full address (see whitepages.com for a consumer-facing example). That then ties into other datasets that have information on income, occupation, marital status, etc for every household in the US.
It didn't know anything about any address I threw at it, so I feel pretty secure. And I'm as public as it probably gets, I make absolutely no effort to hide my identity or whereabouts.
Doubt that's you though, probably just an MD5 clash, since it's a long way from the Netherlands?
I only see one other check in my access log from the same IP that checked for your address about an hour ago; mishu<snip>.com. That did find a flickr account, though it appears to be private, so not much info there.
I assume you were ironic. Anyway, what could (and did) go wrong is the systematic extermination of a particular subset of people in this database. (Sorry for the Godwin point reached so fast.)
Yeah, really this is NOT anything new. Direct Marketing service companies have been providing this for years. Back in the mid 1990s we were sending one such company reels of 1/2" tape with names and addresses, and getting back reports of age/income etc. distribution.
Agreed; speaking personally anyone willing to spend the 10 minutes with a whois database service, my email address and a little digging on my sites could find out pretty much every address I've ever lived at.
(bonus points if someone does it and gets all 3 :))
But I know that data exists - and for now I am happy for people to discover it about me.
Speaking for non-techy types, though, it is something to be concerned about. Less so for marketers as things like stalkers and fraudsters etc. It's worth raising these issues gently to try and encourage people to understand what data is accessible about them - and ensure their comfortable with that.
http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2009/12/what-can...
The scary thing is that if they can get your full name and rough location, it's then often possible to get a full address (see whitepages.com for a consumer-facing example). That then ties into other datasets that have information on income, occupation, marital status, etc for every household in the US.