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Electricity companies scraping data to analyse their customers.
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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Well, yes (but square meters, naturally), but not the address.
So scraping would also be pointless.
Are real estate listings in the US published with the address visible?
Maybe a dumb question, how do you post a house for sale without the address. How would potential buyers know where it was located?
Also just to add to the conversation, in the US at least all properties are registered with the government for tax purposes. And all that information is public.
So you don’t even need to scrap real estate listing. You can just get it from the county for free.
Well, an advert would e.g. be like:
"Nice, quite home located in Friedrichshain district, contact for details and to schedule a viewing"
Same at least here in Germany.
important difference is, this real estate tax information is not publicly available.
And only the tax office of the local government has access, even other branches of the government don't.
So in the US this information is available for transparency.
If the government is charging you x dollars a year for your property taxes you can confirm that other similar properties are paying the same/similar rates.
Also for home buying you can confirm the tax rate on the property with the government before buying.
I’m guessing your system is either less prone to manipulation from the government or you all are just more trusting.
Even with this transparency I personally know multiple people who have been able to prove the government was over charging them on their property taxes.
Here the formula used to calculate the real estate taxes is public instead (I take it from your comment that in the US it isn't?), so you don't have to reengineer it looking at other sample values.
And when buying you just ask the seller, they have to provide such kind of information.
The concern isn't with the formula, more just straight up corruption/bigotry. E.g. a house in a minority neighborhood being charged more. Property tax is levied by local governments in the USA, so they're more vulnerable to that sort of thing.
Ok... Still don't get how that helps with the erroneous tax charge, though.
I mean, if you put your estate data into the formula and get another value than the local government is charging you, you already have your absolute proof.
Why would you need more than that?