with all the bruhaha that life is giving me atm (mostly ha ha) i almost forgot about this service i read about in the papers on saturday.
bern now offers a sms service, that allows people to input a car’s license plates and they will get the owners adress sent to your mobile. i have tested this, and i’m afraid it does work like a charm.
this bloody scares me. i ofc already know, that privacy laws are very lax in switzerland. i can input any persons name at tel.serach.ch and usually find their adress and phone number within seconds. but with cars and license plates this feels somehow different. say my beautiful wife drives somewhere our car and all some creepy stalker now has to do is send one sms and he knows where we live. btw. the service does not work after 22:00 h because – if i remember this correctly – they want to protect stalkers going after girls they meet in nightlife. but duh, the stalkers can always wait till the next morning and pursue their stalking business then … i dunno. its kinda evil.
edit: apparently license plates can be blocked by filling out this form. thx gebsn [comment] and häck-a-bløg
you were able to do that up to now with a simple phone-call or a letter, so it’s not much worse than before.
and just so, they have your mobile-number when you search for a license-plate so i guess the stalking is not that easy…
Es gibt ein Formular, um seine Angaben sperren zu lassen.
@ habi: yes ofc. but i think you would agree that sending a quickie sms in the spur of the moment lowers the inhibition (hemmschwelle) compared to having to sit down and writing a letter later. i hope i am not coming off as paranoid, but it just always strikes me as weird how unprotected some of our personal data is in this country. tell a brit about tel.search.ch for instance and they won’t believe their ears.
@ gebsn: hah. good info. cheerz
My pleasure. Not sure though if Britain is a good example for data protection with their millions of cctvs staring at you and their huge dna database. In Switzerland it’s just that you have to be active yourself to have all your datas out of the phone registers and the different administrative registers.