Clawing back a bit of privacy

Home addresses have always been public information. But now they’re too easy to search.

In 2017, an internet troll named Tyler Barriss called a SWAT team to what he thought was the home address of another gamer who had insulted him online in Wichita, Kan. It was the wrong address. In the confused confrontation that followed, a police officer shot and killed Andrew Finch, a 28-year-old father of two.

“Swatting” is a form of online harassment in which the perpetrator makes a fake emergency call intended to send a SWAT team to the home of a target. There aren’t good statistics on the frequency of this type of mayhem, but one FBI agent estimated that it has happened hundreds of times each year.

The ease with which online squabbles can escalate to swatting is made possible by the vast amount of personal information organized by search engines. But just because information is public doesn’t mean it has to be so easy for so many people to get. There are small steps that tech companies and regulators can take to claw back some privacy that Americans have lost to technology. They can begin with the home address.

Already, the location of a home is among the most policed speech online. Posting someone’s address is prohibited on mainstream social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit — it’s even banned in more laissez-faire places like 4chan.

But search engines put the home addresses of the entire nation a few keystrokes away. And there’s an entirely legal industry that peddles that and other personal information for a price. Search for a name in Google, and you may very well find a number of data brokers offering to sell information for a couple of dollars — if not offering it up for free.

The data comes from a number of places, including property and voting records, which are often public. (In some states, voters may apply to have their information in public voter rolls concealed by filing a form stapled to a copy of a restraining order or an affidavit that they fear for their safety.) But the data also could have been sold through the private sector — harvested, for instance, from a grocery store rewards card.

Once the information is out, it spreads — sometimes scraped, sometimes bought and sold — among data brokers. Some are sites that operate as low-touch private detectives, hanging their shingle on the first page of Google results. Anyone trying to remove information must contact dozens of different services to do so. Some remove information only for a fee.

The home address wasn’t always such a sensitive piece of information — the onceubiquitous phone book was considered useful, not dangerous. But times have changed, and the information provided by these new online databases aren’t weaponized only by trolls, but also by stalkers, domestic abusers and criminals.

There are laws around the dissemination of personal information like home addresses, but they’re stuck in the era of phone booths and yellow pages. Home address privacy is governed mainly by 1990s legislation like the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (regarding the collection and release of information gathered by states to issue licenses for driving) and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (which partly regulates how banks handle personal information). It’s time for legislators — at both the federal and state levels — to update protections for home addresses and to allow regulators to rein in the personal data industry.

Americans need more control over who knows where they and their families live. Home addresses should not be for sale without the knowledge of and the explicit, meaningful consent of those who live there. And it should be easier to remove information from these databases without having to spend hours tracking it down to every corner of the internet.

But in the interim, there’s one thing that would make people safer and their privacy more secure. Google has, for some time, de-indexed many revenge pornography sites and has tweaked its algorithms to tamp down on the proliferation of mug shot databases. Similarly, search engines could de-index the data brokers who hawk personal information.

An intelligent and dedicated pursuer would still be able to track down an address. In many cases, they are public records, after all. But cleaning up the search engines will slow down someone who finds and posts your address in a fit of pique. In the absence of regulation over the sale and purchase of personal data, just a little bit of friction can make a big difference for vulnerable people.