Mike Masnick reports:
We’ve been explaining for a long time that many people don’t really understand “privacy.”Privacy is a tradeoff not a “thing.” Assuming that privacy is a thing — and that “it” must be protected — leads to some bad results. Lexis Nexis has a tool called Trace IQ, that is widely used by investigative journalists to find out information about people — including their addresses and phone numbers. Some people might argue that just addresses and phone numbers should be kept private, but it really wasn’t that long ago that such information wasn’t just widely available to the public, but every six months or so a giant yellow-covered book was thrown in front of our doors with listings of everyone’s phone number and address in your geographic region. Remember that?
However, Lexis Nexis is now cutting investigative journalists off from this service because “privacy.”
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