Jan 3, 2011

Talking about privacy violations, how rude is this one?

I was using Pipl and accidentally found out that almost all street addresses of Finnish people are searchable openly to everyone. From http://en.fonecta.fi/white-pages/ you can without even signing in to see exact street addresses of most of the people in Finland!. I checked couple of my friends and I found all of their addresses. That's damn scary and miserable failure from Fonecta.

This connected to all social media around there, is a scary combination. This gives everyone possibility to basically stalk you. Anyone can know where you live and can go to your home when you are not there or the other way around when you are there. Perfect for stalkers and thieves.

I would think this would need to be another way around in the world we live in. People would need to have a right to decide their privacy so that they can share their exact address to the world if they want to. Not that it is somehow automatically shared with rest of the world and needs to be asked to taken away.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for openness. But also I'm all for privacy. You have the right to decide what is shared. Your personal information like where you live shouldn't be revealed to everyone by default.

I send them a mail and asked about it and I'm waiting for answer. I will try to raise this up, for everyone's who is living in Finland, sake and safety.

They might not be violating any law, though. Maybe somewhere there is small text in some contract saying that they can do this. I just think this is against overall understanding of fair handling of users private data.
 
Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

2 comments:

  1. Finnish legislation on Electronic communications privacy and the Communications market act allows
    publication of personal information to Internet unless person has in particularly denied that.

    This could lead into situation, where publication of information is against social norms and privacy.

    I have written about (in finnish) http://www.evidea.fi/node/26

    ReplyDelete
  2. @Evidea This confirms that they are not breaking any laws.

    Still I think they are bit careless and could at least offer better possibilities to remove information from there. But that would done just out good will and respect to people.

    Thanks for information

    ReplyDelete

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