This is a pretty mundane secret, but it *is* something that occurred this week. I sold my house n Tuesday, and there is a lot of secrecy about pricing--you don't want to let the other party know what your lowest acceptable price is.
When coming up with an asking price, the real estate agent uses an archive of listings in the neighbourhood; given that one lives there, you can easily find out what various neighbour's housea are worth, which is traditionally not a polite question. Also, because a lot of this information (homeowner) is in databases, you can build up a profile of the neighbourhood --who lives where--even for those whose names you don't know. The city of St. John's (Newfoundland), for instance, keeps full maps with homeowner(s) of record listed online, so you can basically look up each house on the street and find out who owns it; kind of like a reverse directory, but with maps.
Again, this information was traditionally available in some sort of public archive, but it's very easy to get online, so doing very gentle "snooping" is very easy.
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