A tip to keep your home address off the internet

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/12/04/a-tip-to-keep-your-home-addres.html

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And if it is available as a public record search cause property deeds and such?

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Yeah, you are screwed then. Many county assessors sites are indexed. Best bet is to email and politely explain Robots.txt to them. Even then, good luck.

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I think this is just one of those days where the bear gets you.

If you’re worried about a determined stalker, then you need your exposed surface area to be zero – which was probably never possible, and certainly isn’t now. If you’re worried about spam, sure, it’s proportional to how many lists you’re on, but my guess is that hunting down and submitting one “remove my data” form isn’t worth the marginal savings on my spam-filtering workload (which, again, will never be zero).

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Or treat it like a real-estate investment and set up a dummy corporation to own it.

$150 setup plus $75/year or so depending on your state, and for a few dollars more the incorporation service will handle the annual paperwork and be the mailing address for the corp.

If you do this in another state than your own (Nevada or Wyoming work well) even a court order doesn’t get very far unless you’re up to shenanigans at the federal level, (in which case you got bigger problems than being found on tha intarwebs! :joy:)

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Considered this when we bought our house, but getting a mortgage for a newly incorporated LLC with no assets or credit-history isn’t easy.

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If you do this after you own the house you’ll have to “sell” it to the corp, this can be done easily via quitclaim, but if you have a mortgage the bank will not look kindly on switching the mortgage, so you still have a “leak” via anybody with access to the bank’s records, so you’ll need to stay on top of their do-not-share forms. You’ll also have a historical record with the county but the data suckers will only use the current records, so once you’ve made one pass on the entire Internet it will stay (mostly) clean. Of course you still can’t ever have anything delivered directly, vote, or do much else, though the physical address of a nearby post-office can help with a lot of that, (they do accept other carriers’ deliveries and can even sign for you).
Submitting a change-of-address form to the USPS pointing from your old address to the new (post office physical address) will help with a lot of the marketers too, so their old records don’t keep slipping back out.

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Here is a good tip: Rent a box from a UPS Store.
Not USPS. A UPS Store.

This is a trick apparently used by many people who are transient/nomadic/homeless/etc
You can have the mail/packages forwarded anywhere you like.
Also- it is apparently considered your “domicile” so you can use it as your Primary Residence for legal reasons. Like a Driver’s License.

I found out about this when I did a background check for a friend who rented his place for six months to a person who was getting increasingly weird when he mentioned he was going to sell the condo after her lease was up. He never did a background or credit check on her. She had declared bankruptcy the year prior, had a UPS box as her “residence” and it was also on her DRIVER’S LICENSE! She was smart though and picked a UPS place in a fancy town.

where is her actual “home address”? who knows?

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I was going to mention this. It’s not actually your legal residence, but you can usually get away with it. The one thing you’re screwed with is services for utilities - those things need a physical address. But you can usually sign up with a different billing address, so it mitigates it somewhat.

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Sometimes one can be too clever seeking out legal protections granted to corporations. Especially when some states have 200yr old laws on the books which give near absolute protection.

Remember those Enron execs?

Pick your poison. Protection or anonymity …

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You can find instances where this has happened to you by googling your name and home address

Send my actual name and address directly to Google… hmmm…

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I will never, ever understand all the people who blithely use their real name when socializing on the internet.

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Or use the same username and user icon everywhere.

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Continuity of identity is one thing, and has valuable benefits that offset any loss of privacy. Letting random sociopaths on the internet know your real name free of any effort on their part is something entirely different.

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Have a representative who doesn’t flip addresses so much?
847 Mardtharpe LN; 400 Jardin-Soyano Family Holding 40yd. Penalty Co… 847 5/8 Mardharpe LN; 401 Attorney Tranche-Gaggle, LTD. (1/(20^11)th of same lot)

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Usually a lot more than the average person’s budget. :disappointed_relieved:

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Here’s where you say what a profoundly worse idea it is to use the HOA’s name parking service, too. Maybe that the method for picking a niece who has positive thoughts is a thankless quest that can only remind one of the impossibility of a keto lunch lighter than air.

All my hydrogen-whip green juice fans say the fiddly glassware is worth the weight? (Sorry, I read about that asteroid-sampling space mission and internalized 2 billion mile errands.)

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Bah, too late for me, I wrote tons of letters to the editor at various newspapers, like this one, where they published the address:

http://randersidag.dk/?Id=8946

Truth be told, I never really minded it. Back in the day where I wrote many anti-racist op-eds I used to receive death threats in the mail, but I always figured that whoever didn’t have the guts to put their name on a post card also wouldn’t have the guts to actually do anything unpleasant.

But then, I’m not someone famous like @doctorow who actually should worry.

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I hand out business cards with my home address on them; my office is in my home. My bank keeps tabs on my accounts and calls if anything seems unusual. My company letterhead has all of my mailing and contact information so cheques get delivered to my addresses when I invoice for work.
I’m a security consultant. If someone wants to come after me, let them try. Their remains may never be found.

UPS box may not be a good idea. See:[http://daltonpd.com/2011/07/former-ups-store-owner-arrested-on-new-theft-warrants/]

Abine’s DeleteMe service does a good job on all of the major background checking services and quite a few more privacy invaders.

It is not cheap but it is a bargain compared to burglars and other predators.