In the last 5 years, I can recall situations where entering my email address led to:
- At least three instances where a multiple people abandoned a new job onboarding due to use of my email address. (In Scotland, Texas and Ireland)
- One instance where someone was leaking sensitive PII and video regarding a workplace incident that killed someone.
- Multiple dressing room / bedroom "how do i look" emails.
- One person sent an email every quarter with a zip file containing a VPN client and a word document with a list of about a dozen username, passwords, etc for the industrial facility that she was a plant safety manager.
- One guy test drives luxury cars in the Washington DC region as a hobby.
- An attorney sent a bunch of litigation related materials to his client. And a bunch of followups to get signatures as deadlines were missed.
- One guy was a big Ashley Madison user
- Lots of real estate agents in weird disjointed conversations.
This stuff has nothing to do with information warfare. Just simple mistakes compounded by complete inattention to detail and often combined with incredibly stupid or irresponsible behavior.
It's amazing how sloppy people can be with email addresses.
We can all laugh right up until we sign up for a site built by someone who doesn't know credit card companies offer test numbers or doesn't understand the value of hashing passwords.
1970s in USA were a drastically different time than today. Information warfare did not really exist in a meaningful sense for the common person in terms of threats that they would have to consider realistically. Information was even hard to come by for the average person in the country back then.
Even ignoring those facts, if you're comparing that to email addresses being known or used today, I think that is also a very uninformed view of the world. The vast majority of the country even today does not understand what information about them is considered confidential, and what is not. I personally see this even among engineers from what are considered top schools today.
This is not a matter of intelligence. It is a matter of being informed. I don't believe that anyone is inherently stupid for being misinformed, especially in an age where information is used for warfare.