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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?

#161

Post by drakonka »

onetimeusename wrote: post #154
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…

Do you get a lot of scam calls? In the US this is a problem, I think most of the calls just use telephony software to automate and brute force every possible number. They spoof the originating phone number but they 99.9% likelihood are coming from another country with call centers like India or the Philippines. If you can access every Swedish citizen's data, this could be attractive for scammers especially if you wan…

I don't think phone numbers are quite _as_ searchable as other information. I get fewer spam calls here than I did in Australia. A few years ago a phone provider called me and actually offered a really good mobile deal, which I'm still on. Another time I had some kind of survey company call. I think there's been a couple more over the last decade, but it's a rare occurrence.

Re scam calls - luckily never gotten one of those in Sweden or elsewhere.

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

#162

Post by cpach »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #152
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…

I don't understand how you don't revolt against this to be honest. And in terms of 'safe', didn't the extreme right just win big because the mainstream parties totally ignore the uptick in organized violent crime? At least that's what they said in the news here, perhaps it's not fully accurate. I understand state agencies might want to see personal data, though I often don't agree. Having it available for anyone to s…

“At least that's what they said in the news here, perhaps it's not fully accurate.”

IMHO it’s pretty accurate unfortunately.

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

#163

Post by [deleted] »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #109
joshspankit wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Can you describe why it will create violence? I could maybe understand that it could makes employment harder for some group or something, but how does it lead to violence.

[deleted]

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

#164

Post by drakonka »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #108

One upside of everyone's name, date of birth, address and personal ID number being public knowledge in Sweden is that organisations don't treat knowing any of those as proof of your identity. It's absurd how that's not the case in other places.

Technically your personal ID is not public knowledge. The first eight digits are, which contain your birth date. The last four digits are always obfuscated. In reality, it is common to provide your personnummer verbally in non-private settings so if someone within earshot had some interest in remembering your ID they could.

Edit: The above might not be entirely accurate, check out the thread below. Some of these lookup sites may reveal the personnummer on registration and possibly payment. I've never tried this so can't confirm for sure, however.

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

#165

Post by robin_reala »

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…

Buy, or, you know, just go to the library. (I did this after I moved here to check that I wasn’t being drastically underpaid compared to my colleagues. Turns out that I was.)

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

#166

Post by hairofadog »

I was thinking this morning about how strange it was that in the U.S., in the old days of phone books, you had to pay to be unlisted otherwise they'd just publish your phone number and address right there in the white pages.

Contrast to today when you can't pay to be unlisted but you do have the option to join a class action lawsuit against Equifax after they oops your social security number onto the dark web.

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

#167

Post by pessimizer »

tokai wrote: post #94
PuppyTailWags wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And blaming swatting on swatters is an obvious trick. To prevent swatting, we have a choice of changing our expectations about how police should react to anonymous snitching, or we can detect and isolate or eliminate every single extremely maladjusted young man that has existed or will exist.

Choosing the first means that you end swatting as a danger. You're only ever pretending to choose the second (the impossible one); but instead you're actually saying that the status quo is fine and in addition you're going to use maladjusted young males as a pretense to take even more liberties with the amount of force and restriction that you're going to apply to the general public.

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

#168

Post by adventured »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #115
PuppyTailWags wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 doesn't work in any other country than America because in any other country than America, the police won't immediately murder someone based on a phone call.

Swatting rarely results in murder in the US, and obviously it makes the news when it does. It's largely an effective harrassment, terrorization (fear) tactic. Congressperson Marjorie Greene (yes she's terrible, not the point) being an on-going example of that.

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

#169

Post by eesmith »

c7b wrote: post #135
ghusto wrote: post #63

Initial reaction: WTF?! The more I think about it though, the more I'm aligned with the idea — except the home address part, that's just mental and dangerous. So all your details like salary, social security number, etc. are public. What's the end result? For me, nothing. I _could_ care less, but not by much. I know people get all worked up about things like their social security number being exposed, "because fraud!…

A strange comment to be coming from a pseudonymous account with no contact info. Why are you hiding your identity on HN if that's how you feel?

I can think of a couple not-so-strange reasons.

1) Note the qualifier "the government knows everything"? There are plenty of things the government doesn't know. ghusto's comment doesn't seem to be that those should be public too.

2) ghusto might be a $FAMOUS_PERSON who wanted to make comments on HN, but not let fame influence the conversation.

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

#170

Post by zajio1am »

vadiml wrote: post #35

IANAL but in EU the EU laws override member laws. So, since GDPR if you want your info to be removed you' ll be able to do it. Of course maybe you' ll need to go to EUCJ to acheive it

Legitimacy of EU laws is based on international treaty establishing EU, so it depends on how international treaties are handled in constitutions of each country to see which level of legal power is assigned to them. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monism_and_dualism_in_internat...
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