I'm swedish as well, and explaining this to my wife from Peru was a fun experience. The rest of the world is not as open with neither address information or salary information as Sweden is. If this is good or bad, I'm not sure but it saved me in a number of situations to be able to search for someone's number via a public website.

Keep in mind that the social number in USA is apparently also supposed to be secret (like a password) which sounds absolutely crazy to me.

Yeah, I suppose that's right. And as you say, it's very practical.

> Keep in mind that the social number in USA is apparently also supposed to be secret (like a password) which sounds absolutely crazy to me.

That's very true, reminds me of this video [1] by CGP Grey, giving some background of the issue.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus

> So are telephone numbers and addresses considered very private in the US?

To a degree yes, there is no public resource to lookup that information. There are however brokers who deal in that data however the quality is questionable (e.g. I routinely receive fliers in the mail at my new address from house flippers who wish to purchase my old property).

People in the US consider their address to be private information even if it is easily obtainable.

Most people are naive. And the public resource is called "Google."

You can enter just about any land line number and find the home address in the first page of search results.

> land line number

I've had the same cellphone number for over 20 years, never in my life have I had a land line.

Cell numbers are often harder to Google. However, if I google my own, I do find a link to a third party site that has my full name and home address available for free.

It’s pretty trivial to spoof caller ID though; there is basically zero security that prevents it from happening and many apps that make it easy.

If you're in the US you receive about 3 spoofed "spam" calls a day telling you the IRS is sending the cops after you, that you need to pay for Mandarin classes (in Mandarin), and "Vacation Opportunities"... so the idea that spoofing a telephone number is difficult or rare is obviously untrue.

The idea that an automated read out of an address (especially any number) makes capture difficult is a little strange. If nothing else, hire Mechanical Turk for 5 cents.

What the value of the information is (and whether it's below cost) I don't know, but the fact that you have Comcast shows that you have a fair bit of disposable income ... so whether it's another spam call to a known good number in a targeted location or just to check if you're home before you're robbed... I'd say it might be worth at least pennies.

Caller ID spoofing can be done with an Android app. It's supremely trivial.

>So are telephone numbers and addresses considered very private in the US?

Very private? Not usually. Unless someone chose (and paid) to have them unlisted, they used to be in published whitepages. And the overwhelming majority of people didn't pay to have them removed.

Today cellphone numbers are typically more private although addresses for most people are still usually pretty easy to find and are often part of a public record that can be searched.

You can just say that you want an unlisted number, it is free. So lots of people and numbers are not searchable.

Unless you have access to facebooks internal database, because surely one of your friends have installed facebook...

>So are telephone numbers and addresses considered very private in the US?

Only by people who are unfamiliar with how things work in the US.

This thing right here is nothing, I see worse stuff on a daily basis.