I thought SS was rather open and gave real name and location when I signed up. Is the trust that I thought members of SS had, turning to secrecy? Has any member of this site had their personal information hijacked?
I understand the reasoning of blocking plates, but lament the declining level of trust on SS and the world. CYA I guess.
I tend to give real names and location also. Except reddit. Because reddit.
In general, we live in a world where information that you would gladly share with people can now be shared with more people. Many more. A conversation you'd have had with a bunch of guys around the water cooler at NAPA now can be had on a forum like SS. Except at NAPA you could see the 4 shady dudes trying to listen in while pretending to be enthralled by the different windshield washer fluids. Now you don't know, and can't tell.
It's not that people are worse today than in the past, it's that technology has lowered the barrier to obtaining information that has always been out there, but now can be easily retrieved and queried en-mass. In under 5 years we (as a nation) will be deploying cameras at every intersection that will record every vehicle passing and storing that data forever. In a way that can be queried by plate, color, vehicle type... "Where was Toby last Thursday? Oh, here, and then here, and he stopped at Kroger for milk. Huh. He normally goes to Meijer." This exists already today, but the deployment is more spotty than it will be (And some of the current camera's just aren't HD enough to read plates). I predict best part is that private companies will pay for the camera's install in exchange for getting access to the feeds to build their own databsases of where people are and then sell that data.
Now of course, I'm not that interesting of a person so no one really wants to follow me. But people should understand how easy it is becoming to access every bit of anything "public" about them.