There’s this woman poster on another, medical-related forum I use. No - I’m not going to say where. This woman for some godforsaken reason uses the username: tallulah_&_tarquin_mom. Those aren’t the real names, but her kids still have fairly distinct names.
This woman lists her exact location in her profile, displayed by every post. “Smalltown, STATE”. I Googled it - it’s a tiny town of 3,000 children. It has one primary school. It likely has one practioner of the particular medical type the forum is related to. Like other forum members, she freely mentions her particular medical details, and dates/times of appointments.
And now she just listed her job. Which is at a kind of business of which there will be only one in this tiny town she lives in.
How fucking clueless. I already warned her about the risk to her kids, but she doesn’t seem to get it. Look what a predatory paedophile (and this forum is already blighted with a certain type of fetishist - it has warnings all over it from the admins for users to be careful) could figure out:
Two kids, one of each gender
Mother’s medical practioner
Mother’s intimate medical details
Kids’ school
Mother’s workplace
Piece of piss to ring up that school, claim to be an uncle, and attempt to pick those kids up. Or just show up, identify the kids, and introduce yourself to them with similar information. Etc. I know schools have emergency systems in place, and try to be careful about these things, but the volume of specific information this woman has posted online is just immense.
FFS - at least think of your kids’ safety and privacy, if not your own. She seems like a nice woman, she has a job that requires intelligence, so what the fuck is with the personal ID spilling?
I feel you, I really do. My mom is the media person for her hobby group and every time they have a function (almost monthly) it gets in the local paper for their very small town, including my mom’s email address, home phone number and full name. This paper has an online version. We have a very rare family name, so anyone who wanted to hunt me or my family down would find no challenge. When I Google my last name, I get 4 pages of hits for her. I’ve asked her to be a little more discreet, but no doin’. I tell her someone can Google the phone number and get directions to the house, and she claims no one even thinks to do that. My God, Mom, yes they do!! (Mind you, I don’t live @ my folks’ but I’m near as dammit and to find them is to find me.)
So, no matter how I cover my internet tracks, I’m a few clicks away from being found by any nutcase who can remember how to spell my last name. Thanks Mom. Grumble grumble.
Get an adult male friend/colleague to ring her up pretending to be some kind of weirdo.
She’ll very quickly get the message. He doesn’t even need to be insulting or perverse, just: “Hello Janice, I walked past your house this morning, I’ve been thinking of calling on you for a while. I hear that you have a very attractive daughter” etc.
Bwahahahahaha! If only my dad wasn’t a psycho gun owner who dreams of the day he can plug a trespasser up there on their mountain, I would do that. But he’d fortify the place and put in a moat and gun turrets, and the property values would fall and I’d have less to inherit someday, and that would just be a bummer.
Or alternately, my lovely but goofy mom would find it funny and give out my phone number, after trying to guess who it is on the phone. Years ago, she did it before when an ex-bf called after I’d gotten married and moved out. No Google connection there, of course, but still.
I see from your location that you in an area with a completely different culture than mine. That said, your concern sounds bizarre to me. The fundamental problem is why someone would want to target this person based on what they listed. I meet people every day and I often tell people where I live (small town) without any other information from them. My town’s telephone book is divided into halves with alphabetical name is in one half and addresses are the other half. I fail to see the problem. There are only a limited of psycho people and they can always find you based on lots of publicly available information (anything from the library to state records).
What seems to be the problem here? The benefits of someone being able to locate someone when they really need to outweigh the minuscule risk of a criminal that is too lazy to beyond the most simple search.
This complaint makes no sense to me. Hundreds of people know exactly where I live because they live nearby. Some shmook who lives in Oregon or Texas is going to have to put a lot of effort into finding me and harming me. Why would they? There are people next door!
Don’t tell people information that enables them to steal your identity from the comfort of their swivel chairs. Don’t give out SSN, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and passwords. Otherwise, the biggest dangers are already right in your own town.
I agree, the danger here is completely exaggerated. If there were 14 children in the whole of America and their location were a carefully guarded secret, maybe I could buy the concern. Look at it this way – practically every neighborhood in America has a school, a school positively brimming with children. Surely your predator would look there first.
And do we know of a single instance in recent times where a predator has called up a school pretending to be an uncle, and had a child or children handed over to him? Not to mention the fact that in your example, it’s a small town where everyone knows everone. Your hypothetical molestor would have to be amazingly risk-prone to try such a maneuver.
I’m listed in the phone book and on Yahoo People Search. I have no idea how some people get their knickers in such a twist over this shit. Unbelieveable! A society of paranoid parents crippling their children with their unfounded fears.
What he said. Why would a molester do this, outside of a mystery novel?
The strange thing is that this is not the first time I’ve seen this lecture. It seems to crop up at some point on every community-ish board I post on. I’m amazed it hasn’t made it to FWD:fwd:FWD: status yet.
I know someone like that to. I see her walking in to work every day. Doesn’t she know some sick murderer could be lurking in the bushes waiting to kill her as she walks towards the building?
I keep telling her she should cover herself with opaque plastic, but she just looks at me funny.
Aaron’s preschool once released him to Airman’s sister. She’s on the list, but no one so much as looked up when she walked into the building, let alone challenged her for ID. The director issued a Stern Warning not to let this happen again.
I’m not saying that abduction from school is common, but it can happen.