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The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal?

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Re: The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal?

#91

Post by megous »

> This means that if you as a private individual writes and request removal of the data according to the GDPR (or the swedish implementation of it, Dataskyddsförordningen) it will promptly be ignored since these companies all “act in the interest of society” (Utgivningsbevis) basically.

Not sure about Sweden, but I got data removed from very many such websites via objection to processing of my data (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-21-gdpr/) (instead of request for removal). If the company doesn't find some strong legal basis that would override my objection, they have to remove the data. "Interest of society" doesn't cut it[1], since that's satisfied by the data being publicly available from official sources in the most uptodate and non-confusing manner. (that source is just not indexed in search engines) So there's that. So now if someone searches my name, they'll find my contributions to linux kernel, and other sensible things, instead of 3 pages of these garbage SEO spamming nonsense cloned from public registers.

They'd really have to push it to find legal basis for overriding objection to listing random, often outdated and misleading info on their SEO spaming websites and misdirecting public from official sources. Usually they just remove the info. If they resist, I just point them to my local's DPA cases where similar companies were fined for the same thing. Easy. :)

[1] The whole point of that article is to override art. 6 1e/1f provisions for public interest in some cases.

Re: The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal?

#92

Post by shafoshaf »

diggan wrote: post #13
dcminter wrote: post #3

Almost as interesting, you can (as I understand it) look up the current salary of anyone you want to. Though in doing so they will be notified that you have done so.

They'd be notified that someone looked it up unless you buy the entire full set of data for the entire county / country, as it contains a bunch of people all together then. Also, in the notification they receive, only which service was used will be mentioned and not exactly who did it. So you can still lookup how much your co-workers earn without them knowing you asked for. But generally people are open with how much…

If the US could do one thing for race relations, I feel this would be it.

Re: The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal?

#93

Post by joshspankit »

soco wrote: post #74
rockbruno wrote: post #16

One of the "pranks" we play on expats moving to Sweden is to look them up on hitta.se, take a screenshot and send it back to them saying "this you?". They always freak out and with reason, these sites contain an obscene amount of personal information about you. Some of them even give you people's salary history, which is slightly harder to obtain but also totally legal. The weirdest thing I thought is that most Swede…

The question is, out of those trillion ways, how many actually happened? This Swedish info is actually public since quite a while, and I have yet to hear of lives destroyed. I'm not saying it cannot be, just that I didn't hear.

> public since quite a while...

I think this is an interesting point. If you were to suddenly flip a switch and have all US data exposed the same way, I think there would be chaos and maybe even violence.

But I think that speaks more negatively to the current state of America than it does the idea of having information be public.

Re: The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal?

#94

Post by tokai »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #88
soco wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is, out of those trillion ways, how many actually happened? This Swedish info is actually public since quite a while, and I have yet to hear of lives destroyed. I'm not saying it cannot be, just that I didn't hear.

This makes me wonder why ordinary people are not swatted, police called on them, deliveries made in their name, etc. in Sweden when a country that doesn't have such public records like USA has this so regularly several people have died.

Swatting works in USA because of how the police handle it. In Sweden, and in most of the world, you would get a knock on the door and some questions from two policemen. US police going in blind no-knock raids with weapons hot on the basis of a single anonymous phone call is the issue, not public addresses.

Re: The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal?

#95

Post by JoachimS »

muaytimbo wrote: post #52
JoachimS wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The people who need it the most are usually the people the Swedish government wants dead," Citation very much needed. Both on the claims that the Swedish government actually want people dead. And that this would need this protection _usually_ are in this category. There are literally thousands of people that has this protection. 14000 women has this, commonly to protect them against an abusive partner (not the gover…

If thousands of people need this every year (and the bar to getting it is low as you say) why is privacy not the default? Wouldn't that be easier?

(Note that it is not thousands of new people each year. It is the number of people that has this protection. Out of 10+ million people,)

Good question.

From a technical, byrocratic point of view it breaks a lot of systems, which makes practical aspects in normal daily life hard. But that could be fixed, right? Efficiency over privacy is a political question.

But, as someone mentioned earlier the constitution and the general culture, society formed from has (probably - I'm guessing) fostered an openness that not only applies to public services and organizations too. For many people and generations, the government has been seen (and still is) perceived as something good. Something Swedish citizens are part of. But of course there are also people and political parties that think private privacy is more important, and should be increased.

Re: The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal?

#96

Post by Mankaninen »

yrgulation wrote: post #27

I knew a software engineer who used to live in sweden. One day he had a payraise. Out of the blue his landlord raised his rent. Apparently she somehow found out about his payraise and now i know how. She even told him that she knows he can afford more. He left sweden for this reason and racism. Before you believe all them nice stories about scandinavia, be sure to talk to people that lived in any of those countries a…

The article is not correct on salaries being public: What is public are your tax reports and those are done a year later. To my knowledge you cannot see all details either, only totals that the tax is based on. Thus I think your statement is wrong or at least it is not related to the public databases mentioned in the article.

Re: The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal?

#97

Post by null_object »

impossiblefork wrote: post #60
m_eiman wrote: post #8

"This system was built and created for a different time where criminality was pretty much absent in Sweden" When was this golden age of (almost) no crime, I wonder?

Maybe 35-40 years ago. My grandmother never locked her door when she was at home, for example, even in 2020, because she'd lived so long in society as it was that she literally couldn't believe that it could end up as it had; and this wasn't due to stupidity. It was actually safe and normal once.

> My grandmother never locked her door when she was at home

This whole 'golden age' of Sweden is just such a bunch of bs.

Take a look, for instance, at this article about a part of central Stockholm which is now extremely expensive real estate:

https://skarn.se/hans-marmbo/ (in Swedish)

I thoroughly recommend running the page through Google translate or DeepL for an insight into the reality of Stockholm just 50 years ago - it's a fascinating and horrific account of drug addicts and lowlifes brutally murdering each other in terrifying and depraved ways.

(DeepL translation:) "Prostitutes, alcoholics and drug addicts moved in next door to students and underpaid casual workers. Pickpocketing, knife fights and burglaries became commonplace, and neighbourhoods once considered stately could now have been lifted from a Dickens novel. In the press, the area was called the swamp..."

Re: The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal?

#99

Post by mikrl »

soco wrote: post #74
rockbruno wrote: post #16

One of the "pranks" we play on expats moving to Sweden is to look them up on hitta.se, take a screenshot and send it back to them saying "this you?". They always freak out and with reason, these sites contain an obscene amount of personal information about you. Some of them even give you people's salary history, which is slightly harder to obtain but also totally legal. The weirdest thing I thought is that most Swede…

The question is, out of those trillion ways, how many actually happened? This Swedish info is actually public since quite a while, and I have yet to hear of lives destroyed. I'm not saying it cannot be, just that I didn't hear.

I’m sure there is at least one 4channer or serious cybercriminal reading this page and learning something they didn’t know before.

Then again, am I the crazy one for shredding my mail? Maybe I should scan it and put it all on my GitHub.

Re: The only way of being anonymous in Sweden is illegal?

#100

Post by mindslight »

eduction wrote: post #80
mindslight wrote: post #42

We really need to get a handle on what privacy and anonymity mean. As someone who cares very much about privacy, this article just doesn't resonate with me. Thinking in terms of having some singular "identity" means you've already lost. The title of this post is straight up weird - "The only way of being anonymous is Sweden is illegal". That would imply that if you're walking down the street, anyone has the right to…

Your comment raises some really good points, one of which is that address information is actually public information. It is interesting to me how in the last say 30 years this information, which used to be just considered a basic fact, has become highly sensitized. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. But consider that virtually all municipalities make property records public by default, which was historically as a ma…

I think it stems from people feeling stress from surveillance and other lack of control, and then they focus on the simple bits they can name rather than the uncountable records being kept on them.

The biggest issue if I were to spill my (SSN, legal name, home address) here, is not that you could map between my name and my address, but rather that you could map from this HN username to either of those things. And conversely through search engines, that someone who knows my legal name could map to this HN username.

Speaking from a very USian perspective, it's quite easy to own a piece of land without revealing your legal name. But it's not the default, and I agree that we should be more deliberate about it so either everyone gets the privacy, or nobody does.

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