Hacker News Reader

Comment by perrygeo | Hacker News Reader

Hard to imagine that just a few years ago, every phone company would give you a free hardcopy listing of the name, address, and phone number of every person in your town.

We were ok with the "white pages" but are now terrified of the same information being leaked to the internet. What changed?

View on HN

If you weren't, you got an unlisted number. An executive who wanted privacy would. Most people didn't care because their usefulness to an unknown attacker was and is so low compared to family, friends and community members being able to find you at all.

good point, and that probably answers my question - if you wanted to go unlisted, there was a central authority that you could contact and petition to do so. You can't call the internet anti-doxxing hotline...

Nothing, as near as I can see. In those days, you could ask the phone company to omit your address from the listings (or even have an unlisted number, for an additional charge).

In my city, anyway, about 2/3rd of people did not allow their address to be printed.

I think part of the change is the white pages was distributed in hard copy in your community. So only a finite number of people would have access and it would be costly to re-publish or re-distribute that hard copy information. Now anyone in the world has access and its practically cost-less to re-publish and re-distribute the information in digital form.

> So only a finite number of people would have access and it would be costly to re-publish or re-distribute that hard copy information.

You hit the key point: information distribution has costs. It always has. And that cost always kept bad actors somewhat in check. Making information reproducible only in a local context was safe-ish.

Until the internet of course. Now it's logged on every physical drive that happened to cache your information.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com