anonymous?
Sun Aug 30 02:57:44 EDT 2015
When you write to PostSecret that you were planning to commit suicide because you have a terminal disease, but things are not going according to plan because you could not get insurance first, it's not so anonymous when you include detailed geographic coordinates. You may feel that "35.7191124, -97.3163949" is not revealing, but it is trivial to pop that into Google and get back "6201-6411 N Anderson Rd, Arcadia, OK 73007", or 35°43'08.8"N 97°18'59.0"W with a building structure tagged on a map. How many people in that small an area will have multiple sclerosis? If you had insurance and the company found your postcard, wouldn't your admitted plan to commit suicide give them grounds for not paying your death benefits?
I suppose you wouldn't have posted this in the first place if you'd gotten the insurance. But what if you manage to get insurance in the future? This info is out there now. Maybe those coordinates are not near where you live, but where you were going to shoot yourself?
[This entry was originally posted as https://syntonic-comma.dreamwidth.org/763020.html on Dreamwidth (where there are
comments).]
When you write to PostSecret that you were planning to commit suicide because you have a terminal disease, but things are not going according to plan because you could not get insurance first, it's not so anonymous when you include detailed geographic coordinates. You may feel that "35.7191124, -97.3163949" is not revealing, but it is trivial to pop that into Google and get back "6201-6411 N Anderson Rd, Arcadia, OK 73007", or 35°43'08.8"N 97°18'59.0"W with a building structure tagged on a map. How many people in that small an area will have multiple sclerosis? If you had insurance and the company found your postcard, wouldn't your admitted plan to commit suicide give them grounds for not paying your death benefits?
I suppose you wouldn't have posted this in the first place if you'd gotten the insurance. But what if you manage to get insurance in the future? This info is out there now. Maybe those coordinates are not near where you live, but where you were going to shoot yourself?
[This entry was originally posted as https://syntonic-comma.dreamwidth.org/763020.html on Dreamwidth (where there are
comments).]