Back in my day, everyone’s address was listed in the phone book. If you wanted to remain anonymous, you had to pay a service charge to keep yourself from being listed!

And now those articles are searchable on newspapers.com!

I do have to admit it was fun finding my mom's old Red Cross activities and my dad's chess tournaments. Any chess players remember Sammy Reshevsky? He was a friend of my dad's and would sometimes stay with us when he visited Eugene for a chess tournament.

(and you can of course unlist yourself)

I'm somewhat interested, did it go down differently in e.g. U.S., i.e. are directory services gone, too?

Of course, your tax forms are documents touched by the government, in which your declared income is stated.

The thing about unbiased random noise is that it cancels itself out! And for the most part, we can compute exactly how many data points are needed to achieve a particular level of precision in the result.