To think is not too nosy?

[azureazure]

My dp thinks I’m very nosy. I think I’m inquisitive. If someone tells me something and it interests me, I will do some research on the topic later. Or if I meet someone who interests me, I’ll look them up later.

Most recent example he thought was strange is that we went on holiday and got talking to a couple. Knew first names only and the area they lived in. They mentioned they’d just sold their business and seemed like they had a LOT of money. They were also very vague about what the business was but said along the lines of “We sold carpets”.

So from that info I was able to spend about 20 mins tracking down who they were. Could see how much their business sold for and how much their house cost e t c

Does anyone else do this? I’m just interested in people. I can find out lots off little info and see it perhaps as a challenge for my detective skills.

If it's out there as public info I can't see how it's stalking.

Completely agree

It does harm you though - it crosses societal boundaries and infringes on your privacy, by revealing information which may be in the public domain (not through your choice, but for legal reasons), but are still about your personal life.

It's a bit like saying an affair doesn't hurt anyone, so long as the wife never finds out.

And given there's not enough houses available to rent for all the people who need one, buying a house is pretty much compulsory for many. So that's information people are forced to have in the public domain.

It's a bit like saying an affair doesn't hurt anyone, so long as the wife never finds out.

Behave. No one is breaking a commitment by Googling your house.

That's a very silly comparison. Having an affair causes harm aswell as breaking marriage vows. Hardly on the same scale as someone knowing how much you paid for your house. It doesn't impinge on your privacy , it's not as if it's revealing how much deposit you put down, or if you have a mortgage, what rate you're paying, did you have an inheritance from your grandma to pay for it etc.

I didn't say it was exactly the same, obviously it's not - I'm making the point that you don't necessarily have to know about something for it to be detrimental to you.

A sign of how decent and civilised a society is, can be seen from how people behave when no one is watching. Scouring the internet to find out personal information which is none of your business, isn't decent behaviour. If you wouldn't openly admit to everyone you meet that you are going to go home and try to find out everything you can about them online, then you've no business doing it!

But how is it detrimental? It means nothing. It changes nothing. How does it hurt you? I don't even get your point about admitting it to the person. Why would you tell them? It has nothing to do with anything. It's obvious a lot of people don't understand why some people do this, but your interpretation of their motives is just your interpretation.

It's harmful (imo) because it crosses personal boundaries. I think people have right to assume a reasonable amount of privacy. So when the OP meets someone on holiday, those people have shared what they want the OP to know. In 'researching' them, she's accessing information that they haven't chosen to share, even if it is in the public domain.
When you see someone's name on a lanyard or hear their child's name at a primary school and then start delving into their internet history to find out who took them to school and everything about them, you are gaining knowledge that they never intended for you to have. It's just so disrespectful of personal boundaries.
I know people use SM very freely but they are usually putting it out there for friends and family, not do that random strangers can pry into their business.
Re admitting it, I generally think that if you are secretive about an aspect of your behaviour then you know it's wrong.
Ironic to expect to keep the prying secret, while simultaneously disrespecting anyone else's right to privacy.

I find that hard to believe. What’s wrong with looking on rightmove at people’s lovely homes? It’s not done out of malicious intent, it’s curiosity.

In some cases it could be malicious. Plenty of people end up with stalkers (and I know this from experience of a close family member) where public info was found online.

That is an extreme example but still happens and I really wish there was a change in the law to make more information, particularly around addresses, more secure online

More often than not it’s just someone being nosy, not curious, about information they don’t need to know. If people wanted you to know their house price or salary they would tell them

Perhaps you can expand on why you’re doing it then, beyond a sense of entitlement to information that hasn’t been freely given to you.

I’m really surprised you can’t see it, what the poster means. You’re well into stalker territory there.

It's not just having a glance at rightmove though, which could be dismissed as a bit nosy but not really that problematic - it's the people trying to find out everything about a total stranger because they've seen their names in a lanyard, or had a brief conversation on holiday, or seen someone unfamiliar picking up a child from school. It's weird and creepy and you can bet if those people did know this was being done to them, they'd be seriously freaked out by it.

So if you're going to do it, make that public knowledge to everyone you encounter so they have a heads up. See what happens!

I already explained why I do it and got told no that's not why I do it.

I understand exactly why people do this.

I had it done to me, once (and I only know because they were crass enough to tell me!) when I lived in a very insular village for a few years, where not much happened, and there were very few new faces and we were the only foreigners.

I had so much of my own stuff going on at the time (young baby, returning from mat leave, DH and I both starting new jobs, plus the usual house move stuff) that I only realised years later precisely how unusual I must have seemed (and I was and am deeply ordinary, but not by the standards of there). This was an overwhelmingly ‘aspirational lower—middle-class’ village. Almost none of DS’s classmates’ mothers worked. They very quite invested in grooming, were extremely houseproud, very interested in house decor, and appeared to take an obsessive interest in one another’s’ houses. House tours on a coffee morning were common, and there was a lot of discussion of Quooker taps and kitchen brands. It was very homogeneous.

I think I didn’t ’make sense’ in their eyes. DH had a locally-famous ‘big job’ and I was an academic (which puzzled them.,as I didn’t ‘need to work’), and yet I didn’t drive, cycled everywhere and dressed accordingly, and our house decor wasn’t ’high end’ enough for our salary. We took the wrong kind of holidays. Plus we were foreign and they couldn’t place us socially.

I realised eventually that at least two or three people had been trying to find out how much money we had. I remembered one asking detailed questions about exactly where we’d lived in London, and thought she knew the area or something before realising after a few comments on our house that she’d wanted the information so she could look up how much our old flat had sold for. I realised someone else had been looking up my university staff page when she started asking me about Oxford and saying I ‘didn’t seem the type’ — no one in this village would have known where I’d gone to university decades earlier. They had to have looked at my staff profile page which included qualifications.

In the end someone got drunk and told me a couple of them had been combing the internet for information. And this wasn’t friendly curiosity — it was an unwelcoming place in which my friends were made mostly via work.

It was pure nosiness about where to ‘place’ people who didn’t meet their idea of what a household with a joint income of £170 k should look like.

That’s just grim. Sorry you had to go through that. That would make me very uncomfortable. As I said in a pp, I rather people upfront ask than go through such behaviour. I wouldn’t want to be friends with such people, the same way I wouldn’t befriend gossips.

Well, now that you know that your public information is...public, go lock it down.

I work for the NHS, and it is drilled into us from the start that what you put on the internet stays on the internet forever. Yet people still treat their open Facebook accounts as private places where they can say anything. And those people frequently lose their jobs or face disciplinary action for the things they say there. Take some personal responsibility instead of pointing at everyone else and shouting "that's disrespectful!"

And before you say it, no I don't Google patients because there actually is a professional code of conduct around doing that. There is nothing that says you can't look up ex-boyfriends, old schoolfriends, your next door neighbour, the carpet salesman you met on holiday etc.

Mine is locked down but your post is quite victim blaming in tone.
People shouldn't have to lock down everything because some other people have no concept of socially appropriate behaviour.

At least my fb and instagram are. Although I'm sure I'm probably identifiable from other sources.
But I don't believe the onus should be on me to hide it @HollyKnight. The onus should be on you to behave respectfully.

Yes, you are nosy.

Creepy and cheeky fucker territory op.
Thank fuck I tend to avoid strangers so have no worry about someone like you trying to find out what my family earn where we live what we had for
Breakfast etc odd behaviour with your DH on this.

@KarstRegion You think that is why every single person does it? Every single person doing it is trying to place their "subject"? It sounds more like you had the misfortune of encountering a clique of jealous bigots.

@LadyBird1973 Of course the onus is on you to control what you put out in public.

@phoenixrosehere — with hindsight, I mostly see it as funny and symptomatic of the kind of environment it was.

At the time, I had so much else going on, I honestly didn’t take much notice, because I didn’t realise I was such a social puzzle to these women, and that the way we ‘presented’ was sufficiently mysterious in their eyes for it to constitute a reason to research our salaries, house prices etc.

I mean, I still walk and cycle everywhere now (different place), dress the same, and our house is probably similarly decorated, and we’re in different jobs, but same type of salaries, but no one appears to find it mysterious!