We used to pick up every call back then because 9.8/10, it wasn’t some scam call
Telemarketers have existed for a long time, and they would usually call during dinner. We would answer because there was no caller ID and thus no way to know if it was somebody we knew or not.
And then we hung up.
What’s changed are three things:
- There used to be an upcharge for long-distance telephone calls. So even though telemarketing calls existed, they wouldn’t be long-distance calls from some call centre across the country because that would be prohibitively expensive for the marketer.
- Calls used to be metered and charged by the minute or by the call. Every time a call was connected, the clock started ticking and the phone companies started billing. That means it wasn’t economical to make thousands of bulk cold calls because you’d have to pay a nickel per minute and that would cost a lot of money and labour. On top of that, the people you’d call would get angry at you for wasting their airtime (especially on cell phones) and thus would likely not buy whatever you’re selling anyway. On top of that, angry people would sometimes get revenge by faxing you pieces of black cardstock.
- The telephone network was analogue and physical. Nowadays you can outsource cold calls to a foreign country and sign up for a VoIP service that lets you make hundreds of calls a day through automated dialling completely anonymously, whereas just a few decades ago, you’d have to purchase a physical dialling machine for hundreds of dollars, hook it up to a physical telephone line, and call customers knowing that they can trace your calls back to you, and on top of that, successfully sue you for $500 per unsolicited call (in America) under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act 1991.
Are you sure you don’t want to switch your long-distance provider?
White pages are where people doxxed themselves.
Yellow pages were business listings. They were also sorted by category, then alphabetically within a category, which is why so many businesses names started with “AAA.”
Some of us who lived in that era and who are tech savvy think the privacy paranoia is little more than the equivalent of TSA’s security theater at airports.
There is nothing stopping anyone from finding out exactly who you are, where you are, and what you’re doing. We all carry locator devices today that never existed in the era of the phone book.
Our social security numbers weren’t in databases with internet exposure where financial companies with information “security” could have them leak. Everyone’s has leaked now.
A lot more people than you’d think are easily googled right down to address, family names, current phone number, past addresses… you name it. Leaks happen every single day and big data is everywhere monitoring your everything.
Having your name, address and home phone number in a book that only has regional numbers and isn’t widely distributed beyond the local scope is the the smallest privacy concern.
Seems like the average young person is fine posting photos and videos on all the social media platforms journaling their whereabouts and habits too.
This comment will be searchable one day if it’s not already. With LLMs I’m not sure how it won’t be possible to match writing styles, formats, vocabulary with natural progressions in these over time.
TLDR: past anonymity is no guarantee of future
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In both cases it comes down to being lost in the crowd.
In the 1980s only celebrities worried about having their information in a phone book. That, and maybe people with really unique names. That’s because getting the information out of a phone book was tedious. The only entity that presumably had a searchable database (other than maybe the NSA) was the phone company. They weren’t necessarily trustworthy, but they had better ways of making money than spending all kinds of computer power on individual people. If you wanted to backwards-search a phone number it was an incredibly labour-intensive process without the database.
These days people are much more careful about certain aspects of their identity, but share other things. The thing that’s the same is that picking any one person out of a crowd is still hard.
Any one fish in a school of fish is relatively safe from predators because there’s no reason for a predator to target them specifically. Or, like the joke about running away from a bear: you don’t need to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other guy. In this case, you don’t have to be a completely locked down target, you just have to avoid standing out and being an obvious target.
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People don’t realise that the power AI will or already has is like the predator having the capability of searching and killing each fish indivually if it chooses, or leaving just 3 select ones out of an entire school of fish. It will only go after 1 or 2 to begin with under the watch of a human but once it’s deemed safe to be autonomous it will scale.
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I agree it should but let’s not forget the people who own the ai have a vested interest in keeping the bubble alive and growing
I hate you and how right you are.
Having your name, address and home phone number in a book that only has regional numbers and isn’t widely distributed beyond the local scope is the the smallest privacy concern.
That was actually the idea behind the “right to be forgotten” ruling in the EU: The original case was an IIRC Spanish restaurant owner, quite successful, but when he googled his (quite unique) name the first hit was an article about his first restaurant going bankrupt 20 years ago. Back in the days if you were a journalist investigating the guy you’d figure out that he once had a restaurant in town soandso and then rummage through the town’s newspaper archive and find the article, and then decide whether it’s relevant and how to handle it, now everyone and their dog is finding it by accident. And clicking on it, meaning it will stay the first hit because for google clicks mean that things are relevant.
Seems like the average young person is fine posting photos and videos on all the social media platforms journaling their whereabouts and habits too.
Heh. The German Pirate Party had an ideological split over that one, the majority vs. the data protection critical twits (they reclaimed the term twit for themselves after being called exactly that). Their blog is still up. The idea of post-privacy is that at some point, noone will fucking care because everyone has their skeletons not in their closet but hanging from the balcony… which isn’t a bad state of affairs in itself, but going all accelerationist on it isn’t the greatest idea.
On the flip side you had a second rift line, that between the majority and the tinfoil hats – a very loud minority, not just because of all the crackling. The kind of people who thought that it should somehow be possible to be a politician, vote on party policy etc. and still stay anonymous.
at some point, noone will fucking care because everyone has their skeletons not in their closet but hanging from the balcony… which isn’t a bad state
No, it’s not a bad state, if that would be true for everyone. In reality, only poor and average people will have a graveyard balcony. The rich people will still hold their secrets.
Or… everyone, rich and poor, don’t hide their skeletons anymore, because people just… don’t care anymore. We are over-flooded by information. Doesn’t matter if it’s useful or not. Actually I’m impressed how Israel’s actions were decisive in stopping the Ukraine-Russia war. I have not heard any news about that war on the media for a week, so the war it’s over, Russia went home, right?
If Nixon was the President today, he wouldn’t even think of resigning.
hey OP, you’re so young you don’t even know the difference between white pages and yellow pages!
It made sense to me because the phonebooks were yellow in my area! The pages inside were divided by yellow for business and white for personal, but my mental image for phonebooks are big and yellow.
I just wonder what the short kids are going to sit on?
Don’t worry, I’m just joking with you.
I guess I’m too quick to defend my lower back pain and strong opinions about people on my lawn…
Don’t forget the blue pages (municipal/government)!
What are these things you call ‘pages’?
Are they like screens?
And iirc you had to pay to get your number listed as private. Like blackmail
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What the fuck, they do cell phones now
Which is why I’ve never used social media that requires a phone number.
Unfortunately they have our info from friends and family that share contact permission without though.
Except here’s no bleed through from the user names I actually use online to my family members or irl acquaintances. Separate emails, separate identities.
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Holy sweet Jesus they seem to have so much info. I’m generating my report now, so I’ll update this when I look through it
Update: you have to pay $25 to get your report so I no longer care
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God the old days.
I was in 9th grade, went to school with the girl I liked. She was shy, but cute and fun. I asked her out, and was flatly refused.
Starting the next year, I changed districts. Thought about her a lot for a couple years. Broke out the phone book and searched her last name. Went through about 6 before I found her and asked her out again. We dated for about 3 more years until things started getting pretty serious and I decided I wasn’t ready to get married in my teens.
I remember for a brief time Google offered up names, addresses, and phone numbers in their search results. Then after like a year (maybe less?) people decided to get freaked out over it. They offered a way to opt out, then just removed it entirely.
I also remember back in the 90s, my mom and stepdad buying a 7 disc set of phone numbers and addresses. No idea why they did it… But it was a thing.
No idea why they did it.
Vision of the new oil.
I absolutely don’t get what my parents have to do with oil barons, but okay.
Also had one for our junior high. Used it to ask a girl out and failed 😅
I am sorry to hear that…, still plenty more girls in the book! 😊
Bro, I’m in my 40s now; that book has numbers for totally different people now 🤣
Fresh batch of potential candidates.
was pretty accurate that any phonebook entry that used first initial, last name was a woman. self-defeating obfuscation
When did yellowpages begin to get phased out?
Yet another business killed by millennials.
Later than they should’ve. Maybe early 2000s?
i received one in the mail the other day, replacing the one from last year. it’s just marketing trash. i keep a current one around because … nostalgia i guess
The beginning of the end was during the dotcom boom in the late 90s and early 2000s. The yellow pages were one of the very first things to go online. The only thing that kept the physical book going for a little while is that it took a few years before everyone had Internet access.
Unlike some things, this wasn’t a case where you needed a critical mass of people online before it made sense to make the yellow pages available online. Instead, it was there from day 1, and it just became more useful / popular as more people came online.
