How would you feel/react if your home address was announced & published very publicly the same way celebrities experience?
I feel second-hand fear & paranoia on behalf of celebs whose home addresses are public worldwide knowledge.
Anyone can google their address and show up/take pictures/lurk/stalk,
But thankfully most people would never think to do such a thing nor have any inclination to do so,
but the fact that they COULD and sometimes HAVE, is very concerning 😟
I wish sensitive information like that could be kept proprietary and wasn't so easy for anyone in the world to access.
You know as a matter of fact, it's much more difficult to find the address of acquaintances we know in daily life. Which is a good thing.
How terrifying it must b for celebrities, so they have body guards and a security detail and full-fledged security system at their houses 😥 it's exhausting thinking about it.
When I was a kid we had a phone book, it doxxed everyone with a land line.
If you own your home, it's a matter of public record in most states. Hell, I once used to resolve a disagreement my wife and I were having over our neighbor's name. Just looked up the property address on your county assessors website... They list the owners, when the property was last sold, the appraised value and taxes, and a bunch of other stuff.
Our county even makes marriage licenses searchable online.
Welcome to living in Sweden.
With a quick Google search you can find someone’s home address, income, social security number, birthdate, amount of owned vehicles, political work (if any), size of home, criminal record, and much more!
It fucking sucks for it all to be public information, but websites dedicated to collating it all under one roof is even worse.
Dafuq, I always thought that personal data was serious business in Sweden, unpleasant surprise
The nice thing about being a regular person is that very few people have any reason to care.
If you buy something online, the merchant has your name and address. They could come to your house, but why would they?
One crazy ex (or, hopefully ex) and one's tune changes quick.
Or sometimes you're born into a shit family, and THEY stalk you when you try to get away.
yeah thankfully I don't worry about such things whatsoever, but we've all heard in the news once in awhile these things do happen, for example a construction worker on a house came into the window of a sleeping child's bedroom one night and kidnapped her
Seems like a lot of people are unaware of white pages
We discussed that here.
In the olden days it was easier to look anyone up, the phone company would deliver a new phone book to everyone's front door twice a year, how could we not all be at least a little fascinated to explore through all those pages and look up people we know from school etc? 😋
nowadays people have to go out of their way with an intention in their mind to go to a website and look people up on whitepages.com or peoplefinder.com etc and last time I noticed years ago, a fee is required to use those kind of sites.
I remember back in grade school (early 80's) we had lessons about how to use a phone book. Now I'm surprised if I ever see a new one dropped off at the front door.
We called it a phone book.
Exactly. As a Boomer who grew up in a small town with telephone "party lines" I just can't be arsed to care. Come look in my windows if you need a thrill.
Fortunately that's optional
In the internet age, it's incredibly easy to look up personal information about people like their address. Sorry, but you likely are easily searchable just like the rest of us.
yep, all my lifetime addresses are publicly searchable and easy to find online, but you'd be hard pressed to find me because I don't live at any of those addresses.
I'm not interesting enough to worry about people being unduly interested in me.
I was going to jokingly post the coordinates to a White Castle in Chicago, but then I thought it might be interpreted as serious doxxing, and I could get permanently suspended.
So just imagine that I did that, and it was really funny.
LMAO gotem! (I'm imagining really hard)
But what if one day you turn on the TV and you look on the internet and for no fucking reason everywhere you see your name and address posted, and millions of people commenting about it and sharing it with everyone they know.
How would you feel? How would you react?
I would be deeply confused.
🤣 understandable
Often when I meet new people they ask me where I live and I find that very strange and I'm uncomfortable with that.
Why do people ask me where I live? I never ask anyone else where they live. I couldn't even imagine asking someone that. Especially upon meeting them for the first time.
I don't know where you're from, but asking about where one lives (in very general terms, such as city and state) is a common thing to do while striking up friendly conversation here in the US. Your response gives us cultural context and may reveal shared experiences.
No one who asks, "Where you from?" is asking for your street address.
You mean like the phonebook?
Here in Sweden you can just google a phone number or a name and get the address, a map of the area, an guide to find the right apartment, the persons gender, how many lives in the home, how many vehicles the person owns, the person's age and birthday, the size of their aprtment, the aproximate value of their home, and more without any cost.
This is normal here, and since everyone is listed we don't really think about it.
That being said, I would be quite annoyed if the press did an article on me where they published my home address...
You fortunate Swedes have really got it goin on
Well, la-deee-daa! Look at you, with all your safety and security and lack of fear. I bet you even think you're European or something snooty like that.
(jokes from an envious American)
The phone book is a thing, you know?
You are the fifth person to make the same comment and we've already discussed this.
And this is the 3rd or 4th dickish comment you've made about it.
As I'm not a celebrity, I'm guessing there's quite a few more options than most of us are aware of. One example I could think of is for the celeb to make an LLC and have that LLC buy the house they're living in.
I'm sure that nearly all celebrities/public figures, once a certain amount famous, encounter crazy people that they should be fearful of.
I don't feel bad for them for this part. Its part of the price of being a public figure. I don't know why people wish for fame. Seems like its a mountain of trouble to deal with.
Ooh I wonder if they could use their LLC to buy a decoy house so everyone in the world thinks they live there but they actually don't.
The LLC would be a holding company, so on the deed instead of it saying "Taylor Swift" it would say "United Holdings Conglomerate LLC" as the deed.
okay that's all fine and good, but eventually somehow the address of the place where the celebrity sleeps every night gets leaked, and the public gets all excited about it. This is what worries me on their behalf.
Their aspiration/ income is directly tied to how popular they are. You can't have both. They have enough money to hide if they please
That's why i like Daft punk, no one care about them until they put on the mask.
Google has a feature where it'll tell you if your personal information shows up in their index and you can request they remove it from being served.
I can say that my personal information has shown up a few times.
You mean, the phone book?
You are the fourth person to make the same comment about phone books and we've already discussed this.
Am I rich like they are?
Celebrities could retire into obscurity, go away and be forgotten, nobody would bother them. But they want and NEED to be hounded, stalked, chased and be the center of attention.
No celebrity owns the house the live in or stay in. No truly rich person does.
An LLC or more likely a trust owns the house, land, everything they have. And those are owned by other LLCs and Trusts so you can't follow the chain. If someone is doxxed, they go somewhere else. Many places are rented out (think Airbnb) all the time. If you get caught, your agent will "leak" that's just where you were vacationing and the next paparazzi photos will be in different locations on purpose.
Then you do what many do, and buy their real homes in countries that take privacy seriously. When you want an escape, you fly to your real house. No such thing as papparazi, security issues, or anything.
Syndrome says in the incredibles, "when everyone is super, nobody is".
In an ideal world, without stalkers, ad companies, doorstop marketers and selling data, it would be much less of an issue if everyone's addresses were public - there would be nothing special about it since everyone's equally exposed.
In today's world though, I'd be terrified AF!
I wonder how many celebrities go to counselling/therapy, looking at all the horrible things people say online, as well as death threats, creeps etc. Must be miserable
Some random but related food for thought: consider Ebay, Amazon and other marketplaces - you're handing over your address, email and phone number to a random seller (on Ebay this includes your order history, public on your profile) and any one of these could sell your private data onwards, potentially exposing some of your online identity to data brokers for advertising or other malicious purposes. Depending on your threat model, online shopping could be a pretty risky thing to use. Amazon used to also make users' wishlists public by default, not sure if that is still a thing
The risks of online shopping have been discussed before and those interfaces are highly encrypted, So while it's understandable if people want to avoid it entirely, we really don't need to be too paranoid about online shopping.
regarding the Amazon wish list defaulting to public awhile ago, yeah there was a big uproar about that. I hope Amazon straightened things out with that.
Slightly annoyed and then I'd move. I live moving and I travel light so it wouldn't be a huge inconvenience.
But I agree that it is terrifying and awful for people who prefer to put down roots or have their lifestyle tied up in being public figures.
Not entirely.
Ever since I bought my home a few years ago, I have been plagued by phone calls from random numbers of people who know my address, my first and last name, and my phone number, as far as I know in terms of personal information goes. The purchase price of my house is also public information which can be something I may not want everyone knowing as well.
I don’t think this should be legal. I understand somewhat why but it’s still creepy and it’s really obnoxious when the “investors” are offering me half of what I purchased. It’s just spam at this point. And I don’t think people should have this much information about me. People I have never met in my life or chosen to do business with (my mortgage company and insurance provider are entities I have chosen).
What ARE the reasons why this is legal?
To my knowledge, it mostly comes down to transparency. So that you know exactly who owns what in your area. The idea being that the public has a right to know how much of their region actually belongs to the citizens who actually live there.
Sadly it hasn’t done us much good because companies like Blackrock and Vanguard and people like Bill Gates are buying up all the homes and farmland and the public isn’t doing much to show their displeasure with this despite it being public information.
I suppose there's not much the public can do when the property sales happen in private and the only way anyone knows about it is after it's already happened.
Depends on how it went. But I'm well armed, and my location honors the castle doctrine, and my town is right pissy about trespassing.
Back when I first got published, I was dumb enough to do so under my real name.
This has led to a few locals seeing my books are the local library, recognizing the name and finding me. They've all been quite polite, so no big deal.
But the truth is that anyone that showed up causing problems isn't going to have a good time. My neighbors are mostly crazier than I am, and we've all had to show up for each other here and there when someone was acting a fool. So, chances are, whatever idiot it was would get run off long before I had to shoot them.
And, since I know most of the damn town to some degree, including the chief of police and the county sheriff, it isn't like an outsider would even be in town long, unless they enjoy the hospitality of a jail. While the police are a problem overall, the local departments have guys in charge that are trying to fix that to some degree. But not to the degree that some assholes from the internet won't end up being seen doing something they can get charged for.
Jesus, being real, I'm certain my one neighbor would likely kill someone if he saw them taking pictures around here without being warned in advance. He's touchy. He might not start out planning it, but he'd be up in their face, and if they didn't just leave, he would try to make them leave. If they fought back? He's a bit touchy, but a whole lot trained.
But yeah, celebrities don't have that kind of connection to their area like private citizens do, and not every private citizen does either. When I lived in the city, I tried being nice to my neighbors and got outright told to fuck off.
Were you published for writing tough guy prose?
Hahaha ah how pathetic.
*I'm an utter coward
Ftfy
Aren't you adorable.