In New Zealand you are required to attach your name and address to formal submissions responding to proposed public policy changes. A while ago there was a proposal regarding The largest Harbor Bridge in the country. A lot of people attach their name to a submission supporting adding a cycling lane to the bridge , And all these peoples names and the address they used are just there online attached to their political opinion. I don’t know if people would expect their address to be public so they probably use their home address. It would be good if there were a way to report documents containing a lot of private information and suggest that Google doesn’t index them.
It was probably public as part of the report on the submissions process, but fairly obscure if you weren’t looking for that information exactly. I found it be googling a family members name. Google provides the way to look it up using someone’s name as the starting point.
Well, no, but I assumed the meat would be in the name/address, not whether someone thinks yea/nay on a bridge accessory - especially because the former can be easily extracted en masse, whereas the latter would need to be individually analyzed and coded before it could be useful - which is generally a turn off to spammers/scammers who are playing a numbers game.
And, in many (US) states, you can find out someone's affiliated party if any with just their name and address.
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In New Zealand you are required to attach your name and address to formal submissions responding to proposed public policy changes. A while ago there was a proposal regarding The largest Harbor Bridge in the country. A lot of people attach their name to a submission supporting adding a cycling lane to the bridge , And all these peoples names and the address they used are just there online attached to their political opinion. I don’t know if people would expect their address to be public so they probably use their home address. It would be good if there were a way to report documents containing a lot of private information and suggest that Google doesn’t index them.
This is also true of the US at the federal level - comments on regulations.gov for example.
Was that information public anyway? How can you look up that data without google?
It was probably public as part of the report on the submissions process, but fairly obscure if you weren’t looking for that information exactly. I found it be googling a family members name. Google provides the way to look it up using someone’s name as the starting point.
That's essentially what a phonebook is/was.
You had a phonebook that listed political preferences?
Well, no, but I assumed the meat would be in the name/address, not whether someone thinks yea/nay on a bridge accessory - especially because the former can be easily extracted en masse, whereas the latter would need to be individually analyzed and coded before it could be useful - which is generally a turn off to spammers/scammers who are playing a numbers game.
And, in many (US) states, you can find out someone's affiliated party if any with just their name and address.