This is not a workplace. You have had a bad experience, and your feelings, while understandable, are not in line with statistical probably, not even close.

If someone is not a total idiot they can find you unless you're in witness protection, and even an idiot could find someone by hiring a non-idiot for 200 bucks. It sounds like someone willing to travel to another country, just to deliver an ass kicking, 200 bucks wouldn't be much of a barrier.

Not mine. I've taken special care for more than a decade to avoid just that, and most (recent) public records here aren't public to everyone - you have to at least talk to someone and in most cases identify yourself. So don't justify giving out my info because so many others fail to protect their privacy, just so that something's happening on their FB wall, or to get a few more followers on twitter..

I don't know Norway's laws specifically, so perhaps it's different there, but there is no care you can take here, it's public information and now it's "online", so too bad, so sad, better to work with reality than desperately wish for something that's impossible because in this case, the cat being out of the bag already actually does matter.

And I don't know how PIs do it there, but with 2-3 pieces of your information and 200 bucks I bet I could piece together most of your life story too, it'd just take me longer because I don't know where to look for Norway.

If I'm willing to break the law it's even easier.

No, it's not a workplace - we're all total strangers here. Not sure if that improves anything, though..

I've had more than one "bad experience" but this has nothing to do with feelings - it's simply the better algorithm for the problem.

Sure, one can hire people to do the legwork (and maybe be a lot smarter about how they ask around), but is that really a reason for others to freely offer information that might potentially hurt someone? While obviously not the same, it does sound a bit like "if I don't sell him drugs, someone else will - why shouldn't I just take his money?"

Anyway, from my point of view, speculating on reasons/motivation, possible resources available etc is utterly and completely moot when it'd be just as easy to give her his info instead of the other way around (provided I had said information, of course). Case solved, without a single assumption.

Neither would ask for advice on a public gaming forum. :)

That's sort of the point, the odds of "bad stuff", coupled with the extreme ease of tracking someone down means being paranoid about it is a waste of energy. If care is needed, a different kind of care will have to be employed, security by obscurity works even worse here than it does with software.

It's way north, in Europe - not too big, but not that easy to miss ;-)

Har har, drinking bites me in the ass again. That or typing way faster than my brain works... dunno.

Thanks for the tip, I will be hunting you down soon, I assume I can use the true documentary Troll Hunter as a guidebook for your frozen and alien country.

I love that movie - definitely worth watching for anyone interested in Norway - although I don't think many "non-norwegians" would be able to pick up all the subtle references and stuff that makes it so enjoyable to watch (for me, anyway). I've been most of the places they filmed, so it's as good a starting point as anything else, I'd guess =)

As for hunting me down; Norway's quite expensive (and getting here from the states isn't cheap either) so just sending me a post card would suffice. (And you'd have to dish out a lot more than $200 for a PI - that'd only buy you an hour, if that).

AND YOU HAVE EXPENSIVE BEER.

You almost had the perfect country there, sir! Better luck next time;)


I will, however, happily be your postcard stalker. PM me and I'll totally find you a cool one, it probably won't even be pornographic!

Why not?!?

I don't agree with that at all. It disturbs me a great deal that people take that kind of attitude that just because one can do something illegally that suddenly it's OK to help out potential stalkers, because clearly they would just break the law.

It still doesn't address the fact that this is between two people, none of which are both in Denmark and members of this forum.

I remember, a few years back the wife of one of my coworkers showed up at work, he was not pleased about the employer telling her he worked there without asking for permission first. For all they knew it might have been a crazed stalker who just said she was his wife. And at bare minimum they owed it to him to give him a head's up.

It's not a matter of one or two isolated incidences, with the number of people and the number of relationships, there's a substantial number of these sorts of incidences that can happen. And it's much more likely than average to happen if somebody has lost contact.

I remember a few years prior to that being on the bus where the woman seated on the first seat at the front on the left hand side of the bus, was gunned down about 6 weeks later by a deranged ex that had managed to track here down. I'm not sure how he managed to do it, but I'm not sure that I would care to be responsible for having let him know where she was working at the time.

It's sort of odd how people just stick in your mind even though you only cross paths once and never speak.

But, the point is that the OP can settle for just having his contact information passed on and receive confirmation that it was passed on. Anything more puts other people in a potentially awkward situation. I'm not even really comfortable passing on friends contact information to other friends without having permission to do so.

My main point is that it's not even hard while following the law, it's just slightly easier while breaking it (which the "bad guys" will do, because they're, you know, bad guys).
And this shit makes the news precisely because it is so rare. This is also why it is traumatic when it touches you. Numbers for numbers, there's 10s of thousands, or possibles 100s of thousands of people who have normal interactions and nothing bad comes of it, for every awful horror story.

Yes it's rare for it to be that bad, but there are tons of more common things that do happen which are also legitimate reasons. Without knowing the OP or the person he's trying to contact I have no way of knowing what it is.The OP assumes that this person wants to be in contact. Perhaps the person does, perhaps the person doesn't, but we don't have anyway of knowing that. Even under the best circumstances it's creepy.

Also it's disrespectful to the person to not ask for permission before providing their contact information to a 3rd party. In some places it's even be illegal to do so without permission. I know parts of Europe are a lot more strict about that sort of thing.

When all is said and done, if people didn't enable it, if corporations were more careful with the data it would be a lot harder to track people down that weren't interested in being tracked down. Personally, I'm always suspicious when people are asking me for other people's contact information as I have no way of knowing if this is a stalker or not. And I'll be damned if I'm going to be involved in some sort of conspiracy.