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).
Wasn’t part of it pink too? I can remember what that bit was for.
That was what we used before Grindr.
The paper cuts were the best part.
I don’t remember pink, but we had blue pages for government listings.
Thank you! These kids don’t know shit nowadays!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Naah, I got better stuff to do than snooping at you 🕵️
And I’m not experienced in it, so it would take a lot of time learning the craft. Those series don’t watch themselves you know…
Don’t make claims you can’t back up.
In this persons defence it’s like them claiming you could have a tumour removed from your brain to save your life. Then you reply prove it. Then they say I’m not a surgeon. Then you say don’t make claims you can’t back up. There are steps missing in the logic
Yeah he’s just be a cunt that pretends he doesn’t understand nuance to feel superior. Still plenty of that from reddit here
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.
Most likely scenario is they saw you browsing Reddit at work and saw your username on the screen. Reddit leaves the username out on the main page.
The simplest explanation is probably that even though the subreddit was niche, the reason you are on it is connected to your demographics, which you share in common with coworkers, making it more likely for one of them to also be browsing it.
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.
This comment will be searchable one day. 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
Yeah I used to get a new reddit account maybe twice a year and someday I suspect an AI will be able to link them all
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.
You still have to pay to opt out of this you know…
What the fuck, they do cell phones now
Mine’s not there. Some woman with almost the same name as me, yeah. Maybe you have to go off the grid for 14 years and the government just forgets you.
Don’t see why that would have mattered, though, as long as I have no death certificate and yes registered address/phone number.
A bunch of my tribe was missing, we don’t have a super popular surname but there’s a lot of us, regardless.
It looked like it was mostly the older older folks who still have landlines? Because we haven’t had one for so long I can’t even remember
Which is why I’ve never used social media that requires a phone number.
Well that’s extremely disturbing.
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
You can get way more info from a free ancestry.com page than should be allowed. Year book photos etc.
We actually just got our yellow pages in the mailbox last week or the week before, I think. I was baffled. I was like they still MAKE these?
Shit was no thicker than an old GamePro magazine. Just the businesses who are still buying ads I guess.
They’re STILL going?!
THEY ARE lol, we actually kept it because we couldn’t believe it. No intention to ever look at the thing, just a “how funny is this” moment.
(Disclaimer: Canada)
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.
And now people willingly dox themselves on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Tinder, Grindr, etc.
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.
Never, if you believe the folks over at yellowpages.com.
Whitepages still keep all your info, so people can still dox you old style.
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.”
hey OP, you’re so young you don’t even know the difference between white pages and yellow pages!
And iirc you had to pay to get your number listed as private. Like blackmail
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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.
