Giving people's street address in the web seems like acceptable behaviour

Couple weeks ago I blogged about privacy "violation" or at least quite careless usage of personal data. One Finnish company (Fonecta) is giving street addresses of almost all Finnish people in the web for anyone to search. I sent them a mail and asked asked about it and now I got an update from them.

They said, that they are getting the data from our mobile phone service providers and in those terms people are agreeing that it is OK to share this information. So they are not doing anything illegal.

I'm still puzzled about this one. I still think they shouldn't be sharing home addresses of people to anyone. Still I seem to be the only one complaining about this one, so maybe I'm just somehow being extra cautious.

I believe in openness, but I think that also should include transparency. Companies should be very clear that your information will be publicly available to anyone in the internet. Users should be aware on all data what is shared to everyone and there shouldn't be any surprises.

I'd love to hear some comments about this one. Would you be OK, if anyone could find your home address from the web?  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen