And since everyone's name, address and phone number was in the phone book (At least for their city) people didn't find it weird when it popped up online. Sure, to do the same thing for the whole country you'd need dozens of phonebooks for different areas, but it was just the same information.
Which makes me wonder: weren't there phonebooks in US cities and in other countries before? Were they incomplete/opt-in?
The key thing about the Swedish phonebooks were that they were opt-out, so people were basically all in the phone book. So even before the internet, it was just very natural that your name, address and phone number was public. "Getting someone's number" as in moves and TV wasn't a thing. You could just call anyone if you knew their name.
And, importantly, they were physical in a time when it was hard to collect and collate the data in all of them. In 1990, there were about 5,000 distinct "white pages" phone books in the US. And OCR was pretty crappy.
Also, in all the places that I lived, mobile numbers didn't end up in the phone books, only residential landlines did. I don't know if that was universal.
Not that any other country does much better in this regard. Still it sounds a little wild to me that you can get this information without even needing to hit a shady forum and download some csv. Maybe lowers the bar too much.
The owner just thanked me, and said was going to have a chat with the driver. Never saw that car speeding nearby again.
The debt information is there so that when the owner sells the car the buyer can check to see if they actually really do own it outright.
Especially great that you can see what employees at competitors earn, what your peers at your workplace earn and what your boss earns. Become a hell of lot easier to ensure you're not exploited. Helps that Sweden has a really strong union-culture as well.
In a high trust culture I get this. But what about if you're in a low trust culture with quite some "not so orderly behavior" (if you will).
Wait, aren't Sweden like literally the world leader by rapes count?
There is a huge difference in most countries.
Sweden may well be one of the few countries where being raped isn't shameful/your fault for dressing too lightly/punishable by death.
Sounds like someone who needs to lay off the X/twitter feed.
In the US you can get the exact same info and probably more by simply paying a private corporation/middle man (background check services).
It seems like a huge trend in many sectors. We have the same setup as other countries, but shittier for consumers because there are lifeless leaches as middle men to make a quick buck.
Of course, contrary to popular belief, Sweden is not a perfect country without violence and shit people!
It seems to be somewhat respected overall though, but I'm sure it'll eventually disappear. For the people who are stalked and what not, it's relatively easy to apply and get "protected identity" if you're affected by those things, and then eventually all those 3rd party websites remove the stale data.
Personally I solved this problem for myself by moving away from the country.
Quite drastic to move away from a country for just this. Did you only do it for just this? Or was this simply one of the factors why you moved away?
The current system has been in place around 1770. There's some pushback against it the last few years.
The problem with this leak mostly going to be those with hidden addresses or secret phone numbers. Last time something similar happened was when it was shown that you could pretty much just guess a persons social CPR number if you had their birthday. Normally you could narrow it down to 6 or 8 possible numbers then use the phone companies websites, pretend to create a new account, enter the CPR number and check if you guessed correctly. Because the demo was done with politicians, then phone companies no longer ask for CPR upfront.
I feel like this should be the default. Responsible disclosure to the affected company, followed immediately by disclosure to every politician in the dataset. Once we start collecting high profile cases this way instead of waiting X days for a faceless corporation to release a fix, companies will think twice about their security and the data they collect if that could make them end up on the shit list of the local government.
The autorities do not, and the guy who "leaked" the CPR number of Mette Frederiksen was thrown in jail.
On an unrelated note, I recently read about voyage of the Mayflower across the Atlantic. It's a captivating piece of history.
The review conducted shows that the unauthorized access does not include the names and addresses of individuals who have chosen to register with name and address protection.
it's a real cost, and a real benefit. I guess values vary on which is more important.
Overall the benefits for employees seems way broader than the benefits for the companies.
On a purely economic basis, wage transparency primarily benefits employers because it reduces how much they need to pay based on actual performance in practice.
Why would transparency reduce how much employers have to pay? Usually capitalists would make the opposite claim, by keeping salaries opaque, it's much easier for employers to underpay people, but you seemingly are making the opposite claim.
If I can see how much my employer pay others, doesn't that help me ensure I too get fairly compensated from the employer? How could the employer leverage this situation to pay me less than I already know I'm worth?
When wages are opaque, an employee only needs to justify their worth to the employer. Employers pay for value net of wages, so they are often happy to pay someone much more if the individual value generated justifies it. When wages are transparent, an employee needs to justify their worth to everyone else because a higher wage is tacitly reducing their wage. This creates social pressure separate from the economic argument.
Other employees are incentivized to maximize their own wages regardless if it maximizes value for the employer. And there are many more average employees than high performers. Employers can leverage this social pressure to cram down the wages of anyone who wants to be paid above average because they no longer have to defend a lower wage on a purely economic basis. Empirically, this is what happens.
Anecdotally, I've seen this play out countless times at companies.
Then your salary will be decided by lowest common denominator. Employer does not leverage this situation, employer reacts to the incentives this situation creating.
Why would it? That's not what happens in practice, and you have raw data to point at, with things like "Person A is half a fast as me, and earns X, that's why I deserve X+N", not sure why you think there would be another outcome here, and it's clear you've never experienced this sort of environment yourself.
You haven't sufficiently manage to enter the mindset of a Swede. Your salary information isn't "your data" in the first place, it's public information. The company is selling public information if you have this mindset, does it still make sense to make it illegal then?
I think what you want to argue for, is for salary information to not be public data anymore. Selling people's private data without authorization (or even handling it incorrectly) is already illegal and actively punished today when it happens, via the long and slow arm of the law.
That is not an opinion. That is a fact. It's not public information, and anyone arguing that is categorically, provably, wrong.
The entire country of Sweden can collectively come together and decide that 1+1=3, and I would give that about as much thought as these semantic games around private and personal data.
1. Everyone(1) shall be entitled to have free access to official documents.
2. Official documents are all(2) documents held and produced by the authorities.
(1)=Everyone includes everyone in the world, you do not have to live in Sweden or be a citizen and you do not have to identify yourself.
(2)=Some restrictions apply (natsec, medical, etc).
In short, most government databases are databases of "official documents", including the citizenship registry maintained by the tax authorities.
Downside: All the mundane information about you is public property; address, birthdate, tax records, school grades, drivers license, passport photograph, martial status, court cases and pretty much everything else you can't think of.
Upside: Applies to all politicians as well.
What is and isn't personal data is subjective, regardless what "truth" you believe you're sitting on. I won't claim you're right/wrong as there is no such concept for subjective things, I suggest if you want to understand instead of wave your hands around or whatever you're doing, you'd try to see things from another's perspective and forgo dogmas.
Ontological games are just that - games. Personal and public data is not an opinion, and it's not subjective.
I legitimately think that it's harder to have a coherent definition of a chair than to define personally-identifying vs anonymous data, and pretending otherwise is stupid.