Now, if someone is traveling to Thailand to partake of some of the more controversial options, then I can see how this would be damaging.
We should all do our best to maintain privacy, but at the same time we should understand that the concept of privacy is changing. And by that I mean that we have less - and will have even less in the future - privacy than people did 10+ years ago.
It won't be long before biometric and other personally identifiable scanners will be integrated into much of what we touch or where we go. It may not be publicly known or even legal, but it will (and probably already does) happen. Just look at the NFC and facial recognition systems in much of our shopping places...
ok, but hunter-gatherers had only minimal privacy so we can adapt to a wide range of "privacies".
yes, it is true that the possibility of "increasingly impersonal threats from far away" has risen dramatically in recent history and it's not clear how well we will adapt to that.
What's your definition of privacy?
I can imagine burglars using this info to decide which houses and apartments to rob.
Anything else that comes to mind?
Any first / second hand experiences of what can happen if private data like this becomes public?
Additionally, some KBA authentication schemes might still be in place which make leaks like this one particularly problematic. Eg. one of my banks still asks relatively easy to answer questions to authenticate me when I call to unlock my card.
The most infamous KBA incident was the large scale IRS's tax returns fraud that occurred in 2014-2015:
- https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/03/sign-up-at-irs-gov-befor...
- https://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/08/irs-330k-taxpayers-hit-b...
- https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/02/irs-390k-more-victims-of...
The type of data leaked by the Thai government doesn't look too bad, but one should not underestimate the creativity of attackers, especially when the amount of data is large (and might overlap with other, previous breaches that contain different attributes.)
- someone who has been to Thailand frequently pre covid.
