Or, change the country to Sweden and anyone can still look it up, even online :) Checkout hitta.se, ratsit.se or similar services.

Which reminds me that someone claimed that the income/amount of tax paid is the most private data American citizens have (the context was the DOGE/payments stuff), meanwhile every Swedish residents income is very public information.

Negotiating your salary is a whole other ballgame when you know your colleagues salary and your boss knows that you know :)

It was the fastest way to find Sarah Connors

In practice in the 80s you could do a name->address or name->phone lookup

You couldn't do a phone->name or address->name lookup

Yeah but I also remember that when I signed up for phone service, I could opt out of being in the phonebook at all if I wanted to. And you'd have to wait up to a year before the new phone books came out with updated information.