Yellow was for business. The giant white book was for people.
I mostly remember them being combined into one big yellow book, but separated by page color (yellow for business, white for personal).
It’s interesting how universal the use of colour was. I grew up in a smaller province most people don’t know (or at least can’t spell). The phone books were made by a crown corp that was pretty much just for the province. Yet, same colour schemes. Outside of the book was yellow. White pages for people, yellow for businesses.
We used to pick up every call back then because 9.8/10, it wasn’t some scam call
Seriously. People make up all kinds of explanations for why no one actually uses phones but few seem to have noticed that it’s because we got to a point where a majority of our calls were shit we didn’t want.
Kinda the same thing with the mail. My letter carrier gets irritated that I don’t empty my box everyday, but he’s the one stuffing it with two pounds of trash every day. I get like two letters a week they are actually relevant and the rest is garbage or actual dangerous Identity theft risk they I have to destroy.
I moved the house landline to a Google Voice account 15 years ago. Set it to DND so all calls go to voicemail. G transcribes any actual words and emails me. spammers leave a few seconds of silence usually. I mark them as spam but they call everyday from different numbers so fuck me, no text transcribed, ignore. if a person leave a silent voicemail, must not have been that important. house phone never rings. bliss
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.
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.
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.”
So in movies where people flip through giant yellow phone book and try to call everyone with the same name in the area is a LIE?
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
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.
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.
There is nothing stopping anyone from finding out exactly who you are, where you are, and what you’re doing.
All right prove it.
Post my real name, real home address, and my current location.
There’s nothing stopping you, apparently.
To find you attackers would:
- Look through your 868 comments, from that they can build a persona.
- Start looking for alt accounts on the fediverse using that information.
- Could be you were active on Reddit/twitter/facebook they could probably find you there, even if you deleted all your posts/comments.
How much have you doxxed yourself through the years?
Then do it. I used the same username reddit. Last time someone tried to prove it, they got the state wrong and I never even tried hiding that.
Something really freaky happened to me back on Reddit. I don’t think I posted anything that was too personally identifiable. About as close as I’ll get is saying that I live in red-county in Colorado and am a Broncos fan. Then one day on a fairly niche gaming subreddit, I mentioned how close something in the game was to a nickname that people called me at work, and said something like “hopefully my coworkers never find out about this in the game or I would never hear the end of it.” Then someone responded, “see you at work on Monday [my first name] ;-)”
I still have no clue how that happened. I went back through every comment I had ever made and not once did I post where I worked or what my first name was. I’d never once told any of my coworkers my reddit user name either. It was a bit of a privacy eye-opener for me to realize that even if I thought I was posting anonymously, someone could still potentially find a way to tie my online persona to me.
I still have no clue how that happened.
Might be worth your time to go to the gaming subreddit on your web browser and then use the development mode of the web browser to inspect all the cookie data.
The company might be putting more information in there than they show on the screen, that could be available to anyone who can do a search on their website for your characters name.
For example, once I was playing World of Warcraft on an alt, and I argued with a tryhard player about being nice to other players. The WoW Armory, when you look up the alt’s name, adds in its cookie/memory the name of all the other characters for that same account (to populate a drop-down selection). So that guy started harassing me on my main character without having never knowing its name.
a) That would be in violation of Lemmy.World rules and get instant deleted and banned.
b) It would put the poster in legal trouble.
c) Hello, Snowden, PATRIOT and PRISM.
I’ll do a proof by counterexample. I have no idea how do to that, therefor there is in fact something stopping someone from finding out exactly who you are, which proves the premise to be false. QED mothafucka.
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.
