Yep. I definitely don't really like friends handing my residential address to third parties to mail me stuff without my consent. They can mail me stuff directly if they want though.
Like sending you gifts via Amazon? Or exposing your address when then send any mail at all? Your address is public record this seems like not something you need to concerned about.
No they are not. I don't know why you and people keep telling me this. You can try to look up my address and if you're doing it on the internet with some stupid private, non-governmental institutions and data brokers that collected data without my consent, you're likely to only find a bunch of addresses associated with my name that are NOT actually where I live.
I honestly feel a little creeped out when someone gives out my address to Amazon without my consent, even if it is to send me a gift. Even though Amazon already has my address, this feels different somehow and crosses a small boundary.
I don’t feel creeped out at all. Please send gifts. But if you think someone might feel weird, the name you use doesn’t need to be real. I send my stepmom things addressed as Nana. You can also use random dumb names like Birthday Boy Dave or Donkey Face Smith.
I feel the reverse, actually. Small businesses probably store personal info in a random Excel file on someone's USB drive and are much more likely to have a data leak that actual bad guys can get a hold of. Amazon is a big mega-corp but their database security is decent and random employees can't just access it for no reason, and doing so would likely leave a trail.
sure, name and address aren't worth much alone. but they get more valuable if you can associate other bits of information with them. surprising insights can be gained by joining a bunch of seemingly innocuous facts about a person. usually this just means they see more relevant ads, but occasionally it leads to being targeted for scams and other nasty things.
the tinfoil hat probably isn't warranted in this case, but as a general principle, I try to let my friends make their own decisions around privacy.
