Two sources of personal information leaks that are difficult to counteract are voter registration and USPS change of address, both of which are publicly available. In the case of voter registration, as soon as I updated my phone number last year, I went from no spam to getting dozens of SMS spam message per day. About 80% of it was political but the other 20% is the standard scam spam. The political spam mostly ended after the election (there's sometimes fund raising pleas) but the scam stuff continues on. The USPS change of address information quickly ends up on all of those "Your Life" type sites. It's frustrating that such basic government functions end up making it easier for others to track and prey on you.

There are good reasons a lot of things have historically been public records. Some of the reasons look less good on balance when those records can be instantly copied, data mined, and linked to any number of other digital records.

I think one potential solution is to put a small financial barrier in the way of access to a public record. Say it costs a few bucks to view a record (depends on the sensitivity, but maybe $5-10). This won't deter people who are doing records searches for reasonable purposes (lawyers, journalists, curious citizens) since the amount of money to look at a handful of records is basically negligible, but for so-called "people search" websites having to pay $5 per record completely kills the business model.

Without a general right to control data about you, this just makes things worse. Doing this naively means the surveillance companies pay the one time cost of buying the records, and then use/copy/propagate them freely. $5 for everyone in the US is $1.6 billion, which isn't cheap but it's also not out of the scope of how surveillance companies operate. Also the cost just needs to be paid by the industry as a whole rather than each company - data brokers would spend $5 on a record, and then turn around and sell copies of it for $2 ea to 4 different companies. Meanwhile, not being able to see the contents without paying keeps the public's own awareness down.

No, the right answer is to give individuals the right to control information that is stored about them ala the GDPR. Companies should serve us individuals, not vice versa. Make it so what the surveillance industry is doing is clearly illegal, and force the shady operators to retreat to the shadows rather than being respected market leaders.

I agree that GDPR-style privacy legislation is the ultimate solution, but unfortunately due to the international nature of the internet that sort of legislation will have difficulties until at least (1) the USA passes some sort of GDPR-style federal legislation, and possibly (2) GDPR-style privacy protections become part of international treaties going forward.

That's sort of already the case. $25 or so can give you access to a lot more information than you'll get from a casual Google. A lot of this used to be more generally available but I think it's mostly behind paywalls at this point which I don't think is entirely a bad thing.

But people can reasonably disagree on what should be readily available to everyone and what should take some more effort/money.

My suggestion is to put the financial barrier at the government-industry interface, not at the industry-consumer interface. Right now a lot of brokers slurp up huge amounts of information from freely-available but generally not indexed public government databases (land title registries, voter rolls, etc) and collate them. They then charge fees to consumers for access.

Requiring anyone who wants a government record to pay a small fee to the government for each record would cut that business model off at the knees.

So I am nearly impossible to find. I’m trans and I changed both my legal first and last name when I changed my gender (and the docket was sealed so there is literally no record connecting my current name to my old one). I deleted my social media before I transitioned and I only have LinkedIn. And my new name is too common to easily find me without a few other qualifiers that would require knowing a few things about me (like where I work).

Credit reporting is one thing, but my experience is that they don’t do a great job connecting the dots. I’m still missing my student loans on my credit report, despite having not missed a payment in the last 8 years.

Yeah, if the threat model is not wanting a casual Google searcher to look you up and learn things about you, it's probably relatively easy for most people to do--so long as they don't have a job that basically requires them to have their name and face in conference programs, on articles, and the like. Or are otherwise in at least a limited public eye in real life.

That's obviously a lower bar than preventing a determined tracker from learning things about you but it's enough for many people who simply don't want to turn up in a random Google search.

> You can't really opt-out of things like credit reporting

Most countries do fine without mandatory surveillance based credit reporting. And banks still gave out loans before credit cards.

How does it work?

When you apply for a loan you have to submit information about previous loans, taxes and payslips. That contains most of the useful information in credit scores anyway.

> You can't control what other people post about you but for the non-famous this is probably a relatively modest presence

I don't think this is right, at least not in the context of the parent. Perhaps it's true in regards to _public_ posts on the internet, but I think it's important to consider private photos.

If you upload photos to your private Google Photos account, it will ask you "is this FriendA?" and have you train an image classifier for all your friends. Even if FriendA is not online, as long as FriendB is taking photos of FriendA and tagging them (for example, to make it easier for FriendB to search their photo album) then Google knows how to recognize FriendA.

I have no idea if this training data is used outside of FriendB's library, but I'd assume so.

I don't think we're actually there yet but it's reasonable to think that, as time goes on, more and more publicly posted photos will be autotagged with the names of people in them.

The newspaper in a town where I went to high school has had an two sentence article up in their archive for 15 years that, in its vagueness, implies I was a drug addict and high school dropout in the 90s when I was 16.