We are in for a rainy three days. I feel for everyone who was hoping for a sunny and warm Memorial Day weekend. The weather isn’t going to clear until Tuesday.
So, we’re going to lay low; read, make and listen to music, paint, and reflect.
An interesting thing has been happening. This has happened in the past, but not for a long time. Three separate letters have come in the mail, each of them from a different place, including Canada. They’re handwritten, polite, with a self-addressed stamped envelope inside, asking for Don’s autograph.
Now, Don has been acting on screen since he was twenty. He has a LOT of television credits, including Three’s Company, LA Law, Hill Street Blues, Cheers, Frazier, etc. When we lived in San Diego, and even in the early days out here, people would often stop us because they recognized Don from Three’s Company. And sure enough, all three letters mention that show, as well as others.
Don is good natured about that sort of thing and he will send off his autograph.
I, however, wonder how they got our address. I know you can get anyone’s address on the internet, but I must admit that it makes me uncomfortable. That’s the reason I use a post office box for anything to do with this blog. I assume someone found it and it’s published on some sort of autograph collector site – a group of fans, maybe, of Three’s Company. Each letter was written with respect and deference and was very polite. I have no issue with the letters themselves.
But nothing is private any more, is it? Having an unlisted phone number/address means exactly nothing. And of course, both Don and I have a presence on the Web through our professional work, Don’s music, my blog, and social media – some of it by personal choice, some not. So unless we erase all traces of ourselves (which is virtually impossible) from the internet, that’s the way it now is.
Just some thoughts this morning on the internet and the loss of privacy. The autograph requests are sweet and Don has no problem with them, as they are clearly sincere and well-intentioned.
Stay safe.
Happy Saturday.
Yes we are not interested in face book, Instagram or anything like that.
We tend to keep our life private
That’s wonderful. Unfortunately, there’s always some information there, even if it’s public record. And if your work is even slightly in the public eye, there’s even more.
Stay safe.
You are absolutely right, Claudia. My parents passed away recently and I knew the property taxes were due. All I needed was their name and address to see their account and pay it. Convenient for me but also very creepy.
Yes, it’s creepy.
Stay safe, Betsy.
Not sure about NY, but here in NJ, if you are a property owner, your address is available through various government sites; the assessed value is there to be seen as well as property taxes and what you paid for it. Has to do with OPRA (Open Public Records Act).
Barbara
Makes sense, but I don’t like it.
Stay safe, Barbara.
Sweet but creepy? Perhaps they’re reselling? Did you know there’s an autographed index card on eBay right now?
Thanks for sharing. I love watching for Don!
That’s another Don Sparks. A ball player.
Stay safe.
The index card states the actor and Three’s Company with the episodes he was in.
Oh I see it. That’s from long, long ago. Plus, Don autographed thousands of Escape to Margaritaville programs. I guess that’s to be expected.
xo
I would be uncomfortable with that also. I am grateful they are polite but still uncomfortable.
Marion
Actors are used to giving autographs. And autograph collectors are zealous in their desire to amass a collection.
But our address? Don’t like.
Stay safe, Marion.
I would be worried about this, but being in your profession, I guess it is not unusual. And I would assume your signature for fans is not your legal signature. Have a great day.
Not unusual at all. Don has given thousands of autographs over the years, as has every other actor I know.
And it isn’t a legal signature. Nevertheless, we will probably ignore the latest requests.
Stay safe.
I am always astounded at how careful we can be, but the information is out there anyway. White pages has you and Don both listed with your current address and if you put that address into Google maps it pulls up a picture of your house. I don’t mean this to be alarming – we are all in the same boat, but it certainly is unsettling a bit! We finally have sun today so heading out into my garden to see if my peonies and iris survived the wind and rain. Upper Wisconsin had snow last night!! Have a safe and peaceful long weekend, Claudia.
It is u settling, but as you say, every one of us who own a home have that info in the internet. For that reason I never look anyone up in the White Pages. I don’t like people looking me up, so I won’t do it to others.
Stay safe, Martha.
I think it is so sweet that he has requests for his autograph, but I do understand the ‘how did they get our address’ question. As you so clearly shared it is out there for anyone who wants to find it. Fairly easily and phone numbers even though so many only use cell phones. I have looked up myself at times and found way more info than I expected. Privacy is extremely hard to come by these days. So as with all the wonderful innovative ways to communicate and find information there is a price. Hugs!
Yes, I’m not happy that people can get anyone’s address that easily.
Sigh.
Stay safe, Linda
Yes, I’ll despair over something and my husband will say, “Vicki, get over it; there IS no privacy anymore, anywhere.”
We’ve (husband and I) been told we’ve been potentially breached (as in identity theft) how many times now? And it’s our most-vital info in terms of social security numbers, Medicare numbers, bank numbers, credit card numbers, etc. We’ve worked hard to protect all that stuff, for what? We gave out that extremely-sensitive info with assuredness from those to whom we were giving it that our info would be kept completely safe; yet, in the end, they couldn’t protect us at all.
I still get snail mail for my brother and he’s been dead for nearly 30 years. I still pay, monthly, for identity-theft protection ON MY MOTHER so that her identity can’t be lifted (I won’t do this for much longer as it’s an expense I could do without; she’s been dead almost ten years but my lawyer scared me on how easy it is for someone to assume somebody else’s identity [it’s why I was very careful in the wording of the obits I had to write on both of my parents to not give too much away publicly with specifics as to birth/death dates; birthplaces, etc. {I realize I’m painfully careful to what some would think was absurdity}]).
I can google myself and find out ‘way too much about myself ‘way too easily; it appears any address I’ve ever used is published, along with my birthdate; and, if someone wants to pay for more, it’s do-able for them; just one additional keystroke. Paying xtra for an unlisted home phone number (I still opt for a landline) does no good at all; my phone number has somehow gotten published and apparently ‘copied’/sold (of course, ‘in the old days’, it was published in a paper phone book [remember phone books; find an old one of those and I assume it’s a treasure trove for a ‘bad guy’ with all those numbers]).
(With most people, they decide not to worry about all this stuff. Just hope for the best. Don’t waste time on what you can’t do anything about. Don’t read of one person’s bad luck and think it’s ‘you’ too, but remember that a majority remain unscathed.)
With the address info, anyone can google and see my house on the street where I live (‘street view’); they can zoom in and even see what’s on my front porch or if I left the trunk open on my car in the driveway when unloading groceries. It’s unnerving. We’ve found online aerial photos of our last home and current home, to where you can zoom in and see what’s in our fenced-in/private rear yards (the realtors do this now when trying to sell a house which could be in the vicinity of your own; they do the aerials so prospective buyers can see the lay of the land; they do the 3-D imaging and video walk-thru; just unbelievable when, in ‘olden times’, all you did was hammer a ‘For Sale’ sign on the front lawn).
I hated when we sold our last home, that our realtor insisted we post photos of the interiors (it was ultimately a ‘hurry up’ situation, so my husband gave over photos he’d already taken for ourselves on a previous occasion; obviously, for the looky-loos ‘in person’ who were going thru our house as a prospective buyer, I’d removed most ‘personal’ items from view) which of course included our furnishings/decor (in this case, it’s not like a blog with a target readership; you have no idea who the audience is [why not just hand over your floorplan online to a would-be burglar so that he can see what kind of door locks/window locks you have {or lack thereof}; do you have stuff worth stealing; does it look like you have an alarm service; where are the exits and gates; he can have a field day going on someplace like redfin or zillow, seeing all the houses for sale in an area; just shop it house to house {my husband will say, “but who’d really do that?”}]). I could see how many hits we got and I felt naked/exposed to have my home and all its nooks & crannies displayed online, wishing I’d overruled the real estate agent; it took us forEVER to contact every realtor site we could find (because it’s apparently shared from the original listing) for them to remove those interior photos after the house had been purchased by somebody else. (To some people, again, this wouldn’t matter; to me, it did.)
I can see why people are very careful (or should be very careful) about posting photos of children on social media. I took exception with my husband posting photos/names of our dogs (after I’d read a piece about identity thieves often finding that pet names align with some people’s passwords). It’s crazy that I’m an overly-private person, yet I’ll share too much on a blog; of course, on a blog, we do have a certain level of anonymity except for the blog owner knowing our email address. Unless some scurious person is out there weaving together everything we say over time in order to draw a picture/make a profile, but why would any of us be THAT intriguing? I mean, you can’t be scared of everything; of every scenario. But it sure can leave you feeling unsettled to see yourself ‘published’. Most of us are in public records somewhere; so, it’s gonna happen.
I wish I could wipe myself clean of the web but I don’t see how it’ll ever happen because I need it for things; we’ve all in large part become dependent upon the internet for lots of reasons. Of course it’s a godsend in so many ways; yet the internet is somewhat lawless since its inception, akin to, as I’ve seen it described, ‘The Wild, Wild West’. I did formerly visit someone’s blog and Instagram (gosh, I loved everything she posted), noticing in the past few years that she is now completely gone from the internet; I’ve tried everything to find something of her to no avail. So, SHE did it! She disappeared successfully. I understand that there are ‘professionals’ out there who you can hire/pay to do that kind of detailed ‘detective’ work (to get you off of places on the web you don’t want to be).
I’m sure I echo a lot of people when I say that I also get a ton of junk email and also junk paper mail via the postal service. (One of my cousins recently had to drop off of her email address/account because it got THAT bad with junk mail, some of which was porn; she had to go to an entirely new email service. I don’t even use a smart/internet phone; I’m perfectly happy with my ancient flip phone to keep in my handbag for emergencies; yet, even with that low-capability phone, I am inundated with voice mail messages from people speaking in foreign languages I don’t understand, and multiple text messages with, well, just horrible words [too many messages to try to individually deal with, so I’m going to have to finally dump this phone {the irony of it being that I have never shared this phone number with really anyone; just my closest family and, at one time, with my mother’s paid caregivers; for instance, on medical paperwork, I never list this phone as an alternate number for myself}].)
Life used to be so much simpler. When the phone rang, it was rarely a wrong number and mostly someone from whom you’d love to hear; there wasn’t such a thing as a robo call or a telemarketer. You could mail a paper check/payment and the likelihood even in those days that it could be counterfeited was remote. You could clip your outgoing mail to your front-porch mailbox or flip the red flag (to alert the mail carrier) on your curbside mailbox (that it had outgoing mail enclosed) and not worry about anybody stealing what you were sending.
(Right now, in the two parking lot blue USPS mailboxes we use in two different towns, each has a note pasted to it, telling you to make sure you push the mail firmly and ‘all the way thru’ [as far as you can reach] so that it’s not stuck in the ‘chute’ where someone can pull it out; mail theft is big in my area of SoCalif; in the past, the post office boxes have been bashed up in earliest-morning hours INSIDE my post office [where much mail was stolen out of them; I had a gal tell me once that she’d gone in early {before the public hours} to see a guy with a hook/line trying to fish mail out of an outgoing mail slot in the post office lobby; I don’t know if they’re still doing it, but our post office had to ‘wrap’ our parking lot mailboxes {in their own parking lot, the blue ones, at the brick & mortar post office!} in thick plastic to prevent customers from putting mail in them in non-business hours but also to prevent the thievery of mail out of the boxes; this was just at the start of, or during the pandemic, I can’t remember the timeline now]. But, in general, you didn’t have to ‘live life’ worrying about anybody scamming you [the biggest concern I can recall from my youth is if you somehow got rigged into a ‘chain letter’ in the ‘paper mail’ with the threat that if you didn’t do your part, you’d break the chain {and something ‘bad’ would happen!}].)
Even today, my best shopping trip is when I pay in cash so I can’t be tracked via my purchases. (I know the stores do that so they can tease you with coupons they think you’d need, but I don’t like the ‘Big Brother’ effect of it.) In this day and age, any kind of purchasing large and small, in a retail setting, online ordering, one’s medical records in a lab or doctor’s office or hospital — it all gets logged into a computer and once it’s in there, it seems to be there for the taking.
Again, I’m old enough now to remember when life was simpler and I often (more and more) yearn for that simplicity, realizing we can never go back; this is the new world and simply how it’s going to be. Information sharing and the speed of the web, for instance, can make a difference in the life of a medical patient and all kinds of stuff. What if we didn’t have the internet to log data about Covid and the vaccines/testing? How could kids/adults have continued with their schooling in 2020 if there’d been no virtual learning? There are thousands of examples of why the web is good; probably/maybe less of why it’s bad.
But I wish I’d been born 15 years earlier. I think I missed some better/simpler times (THAT, of course, could be widely argued). Like, if my parents had gotten married BEFORE World War II instead of after (and, as a result, they didn’t have kids til their 30s). But Mom didn’t want to get stuck with a baby and be a young widow, if Dad got killed in battle (I’ve been thinking of some of this because it’s the Memorial Day weekend; she didn’t quite say it like that; but I think she’d known a woman who’d had such a tragic thing happen; times were hard; memories of The Great Depression they’d all just gone thru were indelible; none of my ‘peeps’ had any money, and my mom was in great part helping financially support her parents in the early 40s; at one point, my mother had two jobs; she was working full-time in a financial institution in the big city when she was only age 16, having graduated from high school early, essentially out of necessity).
Anyway, it’s weird to think you’ve been born in the wrong era, but I’ve always felt that way (since I was a kid).
Claudia, earlier when you wrote the post (“just some thoughts this morning on the internet and the loss of privacy”), what can I say, it hit a nerve with me and I’ve gone bonkers with it here today. I wish I could just ‘throw off’ worries about loss of privacy, let it slide right off my back, but I do let it needle at me too much (which is clear!). I can totally understand why you’ve pondered the subject in your post.
I ponder it, and I’m careful, but I cannot and will not let it consume me. Worry, and I’m a worrier by nature, accomplishes nothing. Be careful, be wise, and let it go.
xoxo
Exactly. You can’t let yourself be scared of everything. Just be sensible?
I try not to worry about it, though I do find google view and addresses unnerving. There’s nothing I can do about, though, except (what we decided earlier today) no ,ore responding to autograph requests. Though Don has signed thousands of autographs during his career. Especially with ETM – people at the stage door every night.
Stay safe, Vicki.
Woke up to sunny skies and forcast for 70° the next 3 days. We will send it on to you in a few days.
I would be a little uncomfortable about your address being found.
I guess it’s not very hard to get info on any of us though.
Your rainy day plans sound good.
Stay safe
Yours can be found just as easily. That’s what is unnerving. It’s all a matter of public record. I think we’re going to ignore any more autograph requests.
Stay safe, Marilyn.
To find your adress /any adress costs two clicks: one in google search, one to proof the location on google maps streetview . Simple as that. That’s the price we have to pay for all the benefits of digitalizm.
We in Germany are overdue to digitize our datas than any other country and we had to pay that with an inefficient health- and education system.
People of our generation are unconfortable with this transparency. But I’m afraid we’ll have to get used to it. Could be difficult to protect ourselves from criminal influences.
That could be one of the many challenges of our time. I agree with Martha Scales in this subject.
I wish you too a very peaceful weekend, stay safe!
Helga
It’s definitely a challenge. I’m glad I’m older and lived for many years without any of this.
Stay safe, Helga.
When I was teaching I saw the harm social media brings to too many. I have none. I comment on few blogs with first name only. Too too many horror stories. Probably not safe to mail signature to anyone. Sorry just saying
Prayers
Oh, it’s fine, I think. Actors autograph things all the time, including the thousand of Escape to Margaritaville programs Don autographed. But we’ll probably ignore any more requests. Remember, actors have publicists who mail out autographed photos all the time.
Stay safe.
I do hope that Don has a different way to give away his signature than the one he uses for important documents and checks. With all the scams out there today we must be especially careful. Knowing your address and now wanting his autograph I would be very careful. Sadly today we all must be very careful of personal information in the hands of those who can really cause us trouble.
Every actor I know signs autographs and has for years. If we worried about that, we’d drive ourselves crazy. For Escape to Margaritaville alone, Don signed thousands of programs. Famous actors send out autographed photos. And everyone’s address can be found online.
But, to your point, we’re not going to answer those requests. We decided that earlier today.
Stay safe.
We’ll never be free of the online searching for our addresses and phone numbers. I was more concerned about it when I was younger and working — first in collections for public health clinic and then for those decades in TV. I had an unlisted number and back then the internet wasn’t so “there” so for a lot of those years, that was enough to keep privacy. I think I gave that up with social media and online searches came into vogue.
I wondered (to protect for identity theft and clever people with unkind motives) if Don has two signatures — his official “sign autographs” signature and his legal document signature for credit cards, etc. I’ve known enough people who have had to rebuild after identity theft that I wondered if that would be an issue. I think it’s lovely to get those requests!
Don isn’t at all concerned about it. He’s signed thousands of autographs over the years and so have all his actor friends, famous and not famous. And anyone’s address can be found online. Those letters were sincere.
Thanks, Jeanie.
Stay safe.