> And I don't think they had location/address,
> though it's been so long now that I can't remember for sure
Then i remembered the scene from Terminator 2 (1991) in which it looks up Sarah Connor's phone-number and home-address in a phone-book! :-)
(Name was ProPhone 1993, so not really pre 90's) https://youtu.be/yBupNdYe08g?t=1078
There were a few services in the early 2000s doing this, they were called Reverse Grey Pages
And funnily enough, family members of mine have started multiple businesses named A-1 something. :)
you can opt out of Facebook too... and Irish phone books had addresses...
This is not true.
Facebook builds profiles about millions of people who have never had a Facebook account. For example, people who happened to be in the background of a photograph taken by a stranger. Another example: people who installed an app on their phone without knowing that it included a Facebook SDK that was tracking them.
This is nothing new. It's been discussed in public, and even before the U.S. congress.
Personally, I'd love to opt out of Facebook. But I can't. Because I can't log in to my Facebook account, and Facebook ignores my requests for access. I even did the "send in a picture of your government ID" route, and nothing happened. So please inform me how I can opt out of Facebook's data gathering.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-...
There's a difference between information that government and big tech is scraping and storing, vs information that is publicly available to literally any random person online to scrape.
Both are problems, but those are different discussions and we started with talking about the issue of truly publicly available information. I think that's an interesting topic that merits its own discussion without falling into the surveillance discussion once again.
There is an interesting discussion to be had about what it means for information to be public, since public information is also now _searchable_ information, which never used to be the case. What are the implications for that when it comes to laws about what constitutes "public" information, and social norms on what we share publicly.
But once again instead of discussing that conversation, we're dragged back into the corporate and government surveillance, yet again.
You'd literally have to have the kind of Momma that would dig a hole and hide you in it at birth to really be "off the grid" at this point.
What is weird to me are so many of the responses to my comment are along the lines of "But the real danger now is that all of this data can be correlated with other sources of info, and it's all instantly searchable." It's weird to me because that's the point I was trying to make in my last paragraph, to explain that that really has nothing to do with Facebook. The "hackers" aren't even claiming there was a breach, just information they screen scraped. The ability to amass giant databases of information and make it available to the world to search is something fundamentally inherent to the Internet.
I lived in a lot of different places in the US in the 70s and 80s. All the phone books had residential addresses listed.
This is the format and font I remember: https://groovyhistory.com/content/50602/01af8c322a21e50d0b81...
But... you could tell the phone company not to list your address, and then they wouldn't.
If you wanted to pay a monthly fee for even more privacy, you could have your number unlisted entirely.
They most definitely did have addresses.
To find the phone number of a friend having just "John Smith, USA" would be impossible (or would annoy thousands of people and require months of calls).
Which cost money! Being listed was gratis.
Fair, although you could opt out of the phone book. (And I don't think they had location/address, though it's been so long now that I can't remember for sure.)
> I think people are grappling with the fact that the Internet just makes data scraping and processing possible on a scale previously unimaginable
This is it right here. The scale and ease of access are terrifying. It's true that in the olden days, someone could follow me around and write down everywhere I went, everyone I talked to, what stores I went to, my hobbies, and so on. But someone would actually have to do that, and they would have to single me out, and even then the information they collected would be in a notebook, not distributed to virtually every human on the planet.
Now we are all being followed, all the time, and all of that information is available to anyone with almost no cost or effort. This is a sea change, and personally I find it horrifying. There are very, very few people I would trust with that much information. I definitely don't trust the whole world with it.