Those systems were analog and could only be scaled to a certain extent, after which you ran into management overhead.
So in the example given by the OP, dominoes would not be updating your name in the directory.
That would be data that evaporated and never made it to record.
To increase the contrast - whole new types of clustering and analysis are now possible, at the moment a new data point is received.
Dreeben cited United States v. Knotts as an example where police were allowed to use a device known as a "beeper" that allows the tracking of a car from a short distance away. Chief Justice Roberts distinguished the current case from Knotts, saying that using a beeper still took "a lot of work" whereas a GPS device allows the police to "sit back in the station ... and push a button whenever they want to find out where the car is."
Edit: add citation [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Deja_News
The numbers weren't widely cross-referenced across multiple other identifier databases: shopping, driving, voting, location to 1m accuracy and 30s time precision.
Every household, small business, mafioso, or political operative didn't have a full copy of the archive, and the ability to deploy it at a moment's notice.
Or in short: scale and costs matter. In fact they dominate all other effects.
Your objection is both meaningless and betrays a profound failure of undrestanding and sympathy.
The phone book is an opt-in system, with the ability to remain "unlisted". There's absolutely no such choice, though, from these modern, private data collectors. And they're everywhere.
Consider the following hypothetical: A battered wife flees her husband and takes shelter in a shared house run by a women's organization.
In your phone book world, she didn't need to dramatically alter her existence to stay safe. She could continue to maintain a reasonable subset of her professional and social relationships. She could get a new job in a new city. She could buy groceries. She could pay her own electricity bill. And she definitely didn't need to take her life in her hands to order a cheese pizza.
In this brave new world, though, her ex can track her with the utmost ease. She has to shed nearly every piece of her modern identity -- reconfigure apps, wipe her phone/laptop/tablet, stop using sites that geolocate via IP, and halt nearly all interactions with the modern economy -- at significant social cost.
The sheer number and diversity of data collection points -- and their increasing necessity to participate in the digital economy -- makes opting out orders-of-magnitude more difficult. Yours is a false comparison.
Not saying this is the one true answer, but I don't find it hard to imagine why.