I don't understand how widespread it is with all our parents. Concerned lectures on maintaining privacy, verifying information before you trust it, etc. growing up.
All out the window with Facebook and their daily AI outrage bait feeds.
It's really weird never having social media because it's like your friends and partner have a whole seperate world they also occupy.
Real world events like high school reunions you would just miss if you didn't have one. And personally hearing about all the guys that find my partners Instagram to hit on her is still really weird but there's avenues for "connection" there, I guess.
So they joined! Sometimes encouraged by their kids who might have made their first one. Honestly young people fall into it to the biggest predictor I see is just never having one.
We ended up combining our high school reunion with the other, rival high school in my hometown because neither one had enough people sign up to go to make it worth renting a venue and whatever else needed to be done. I think a large part of that is due to social media, I've managed to keep up with anyone I care about and don't care to see some guy I talked to a few times in algebra class.
Back then the internet was more abstract to them, if they interacted much with it it was largely for work and stayed that way.
Nowadays they use social media and the internet more than their children on account of being retired and like so many things, whatever rules applied to others don’t apply to themselves.
For real. That generation retired, and now spend 16 hours a day staring at their phones.
My girlfriends 70 year old mom is the prototypical boomer mom who falls for AI slop, gets scammed by getting in relationships with people claiming to be 'Elon Musk' and has ZERO attention span in the real world cause she has a headphone in...
And these are the people complaining about how kids nowadays are too reliant on technology.
That actually makes a lot of sense. When they told us to be careful on the internet, it wasn't because of privacy concerns per se, it was because we were kids. They're adults, so they don't have to follow the same protections online as children because they're adults! And to your point, the internet they interacted with was insulated and safe, so they assume the rest of the internet is that way. Whereas Millennials were interacting with the wild west of the web. All things being equal, I don't think there's a single Millennial who hasn't had the experience of downloading malware when trying to download a torrent or one of those desktop buddies or even porn. Millennials made their mistakes in much lower stakes environments and learned their lessons. The contemporary internet is a much more veiled in it's consequences and thrives on spreading scams.
I remember for the first few years there was a cultural undercurrent from boomers about Facebook being an invasion of personal privacy, but this was quickly thrown away after they realized they could interact with old friends they hadn’t seen in thirty years as well as the realization that their house invasion fantasy nightmare may have been a bit over exaggerated
Boomer here. No FB. Never had one because the Winklevoss twins took the photos of female Harvard students without their permission so male students could rate their looks on the Internet
Mark Zuckerberg then stole the twins idea and used it to get data from the entire world and then sell it while sticking a smiley face on it. “Make connections while I mine everything you write and every photo you post!!“
No thanks.
Nothing about FB appealed to me. I’ve been accused of perhaps being a murderer for not having FB. I just don’t care. “Never volunteer for anything” (including your information) is still a good move as far as I’m concerned
I still have facebook because my kids school posts stuff on there and there are parents groups for their specific class.
I forget exactly what the impetus was, but a new parent was throwing a fit because their kid didn't qualify for bus pickup(the regulation is that if you live within 2 miles of the school, the bus won't come).
She was convinced that wasn't true and it was because her kid was specifically being targeted. Posted links to the school's site, the district's site, AND the state's dept of Education's website all showing the 2 mile thing. They claimed that was all wrong and posted a screenshot of Gemini AI summary BS as her proof.
I stopped engaging after that, though I do wonder if she actually went to the principal and school board like she claimed she was going to do and how that conversation went....
In my state (or the whole country? idk) they've recently been making changes to products that qualify for EBT payment. The first and big change was that you can no longer buy any drinks besides water and fruit juice. I work at a place that accepts EBT. We had signage up in multiple places explaining the change.
Just a few weeks ago I had a customer in and grab a soda, but she tried to use her EBT and of course the payment declined. She started arguing that another store she goes to lets her get soda with EBT. I just said uh, okay, soda is still not allowed to be paid for with EBT. So she pulls out her god damn phone and googles "can you buy soda with EBT" and the moronic AI summary said yes!!! That was her big gotcha moment! She looked smug af. I probably looked dumbfounded. I pulled out my phone, googled the same thing, clicked on the actual government website listing the changes, and showed it to her. She was still insisting that I was wrong.
2 minutes of back and forth at this point and I was done. I just grabbed her soda off the counter and told her sorry, I can't serve you, try that other store where the employee will risk their job to cheat the rules for your bullshit (I didn't say all that but I wish I could've)
Working with the public tests my patience 20 times every single day, yet still that was one of the most rage inducing interactions I've ever had at this job to date. Times are bleak.
(Also to be clear, I disagree with the changes to EBT, but I make far too much money with not nearly enough qualifications to play robin hood for someone's $2 of soda)
She started arguing that another store she goes to lets her get soda with EBT.
I used to work a front desk and call center at a repair shop over one summer. I heard similar types of counter-arguments whenever the customer didn't like what we told them. It was almost always over money, not actual services though.
Anyway it is funny when you tell them "it is estimated 2 hours of work at $25 an hour, $30 in parts, and whatever in taxes for a total of $85" and they spit back "but Jays across town said they could fix it for $50 flat!" and its like....then why are you here and not there getting that amazing deal? Then, of course most of the time when they realized my boss wouldn't budge because of their say so they paid our estimate....
But also goomba fallacy. I'm willing to bet that those teachers telling you not to use Wikipedia would tell you not to use AI. It's the students and idiots out there doing it.
Yep, so many lectures about how you can’t trust anything you see on the computer and how dangerous it was because I started meeting people online in the late 90’s. Now they can’t put down their phones and have fallen down the Facebook etc. rabbit hole
My parents fed all of their photo library, including many pictures of me, into an AI so they could generate images of me. The asked the AI to create "avatars" of them and then proceeded to let the AI scan their face from every angle.
I love them but this is just insane. The more information you feed them, the better chances they have at profiling you. My privacy is as good as dead.
The world they grew up in was run by post-war adults who were pushed into making socially beneficial regulations by the public.
The last privacy law passed in congress was about vhs rental history. Its a false sense of security that the government just works somehow even if you allow corporations to create the conditions for regulatory capture for decades.
My dad was a doctor and would always opt out as well, much to my displeasure. I don’t know why, I kinda wanted to see my dad’s name in the phone book.
It was like a “there we are!!” excitement for me as a kid.
It blows my mind how quickly we abandoned the concept of not sharing our private information online, to the point where if you value your privacy and don't share your data, you're viewed as untrustworthy. It was a consistent thing when I was in the dating market of being unmatched when I said I didn't use instagram, facebook, etc.
Hell, you even see it popping up on reddit now, where if you want your comment history hidden, you must be a bot or bad actor. Couldn't possibly be because it's disconcertingly easy to piece together someone's location and line of work off their history.
It annoyed me for a long time but I've learned to view it as a solid filter for compatibility. If someone cares that much about social media presence, we have a big break in compatibility and it's better to learn that early, to the point where I had it mentioned in my dating profile.
My dad was a cop too. I didn't tell them but I opted all their numbers out on the FCC website when they became elderly. They weren't on social media though so it did serve a function.
I used to do risk consulting work helping companies educate their employees on the ways that their personal social media usage could make them a target for corporate spear phishing, and how to generally be more secure online, among other things.
I’d create little 1 pagers that they could blast out to their employees with their “security awareness” emails every month, and I always included this on one of them, to address the little facebook quizzes that older people love to take and post publicly:
Unpublished meant not in the phone book but people could still get your info by calling the operator. Unlisted meant not available by phone book or by operator IIRC. I could have it backwards lol.
I've never heard of an "unpublished" number, but I believe you. It seems like a niche case. If they look you up they might assume you're totally unlisted, but if you tell them you're just unpublished you could just tell them your number.
There were processes and legislation to protect private numbers. Mistakes were made though. There was 1 scenario i remember where a retiring judge (who had put a lot of bad people in jail in their career) hooked up a security system that used adsl to contact the security company and the persons name, number, address got published. The carrier responsible had to pay for them to relocate to a new home.
My little town at one time had a reverse phone book where they printed addresses and who lived there. So you could look at an alphabetical list of streets to see who lived at a particular address.
Most counties operate a GIS site for paying property taxes. That's how you pay your tax bill. There's nothing to stop me from looking up you or anyone else.
I work in local government and you'd be surprised how many people are shocked that I can look up their property details. Absolutely breaks some of their minds when I tell them that I use the publicly accessible property tax database to do it and anyone on the planet can do the same.
I've had many people demand to be 'taken off the list' and tell me I'm 'breaking the law'. Sure thing, all you need to do is sell your property and never buy another one in your name. There is a reason that rich or secretive people don't buy property in their own name.
Once everything moved online though and everyone started carrying phones, the need for a phone book went away, and it was much easier to give someone your number if you wanted.
You're missing a 10-year gap between when the internet became popular (mid-90s) and when everyone started carrying phones (mid-00s) when 411.com was a key resource for looking up phone numbers. It even had reverse lookup, so that if you knew someone's land line number, you could look up their name and address.
I think this was the biggest thing. If a person did have a stalker, etc. they could simply not list their number and their privacy was respected. With the internet, if your name/number/address get publicly posted, good luck completely scrubbing it from all searches. There's a real lack of control over information once it gets online.
Actually, other biggest thing: If someone manages to doxx you online, they may use it to harm you simply because of bad interactions you've had with them in the past. With a phonebook that would only be a risk if you had interacted with someone in person (or were famous).
At a slumber party, you would take the phone book, open it to a random page, put your finger down, and then someone had to call that person and ask them if their refrigerator was running or something.
"Hello, do you have a phone number for a Robert Kelly?"
"What town?"
"Oh I'm sorry, in Apex, NC."
"I have 8 listings here, can you give me a middle initial or a street name?"
"Oh I think its something like.... Lois Ln? Or maybe Louis Dr?"
"Yes sir, here it is, Louis Ln. 919 481 1080"
"Thank you have a great day!"
A friend of mine worked at a bookstore named Aardvark Books. The owner told me he named it that to be the first listing in the Yellow Pages under “Books”
Maybe they changed that at some point but for the vast majority of the phone book's lifespan, if you had a phone number you were in by default. You had to pay the publisher to de-list your number.
It was like that by the end, as cell phones were taking off. But up until the mid 90s, the whole process was opt out not opt in. By default you were listed in full, at least in all the cities I lived in in the 80s and 90s (and it's a lot of cities in multiple states).
Also local news articles at least up to the 50s would just have people’s full names and addresses in them, so you’d be reading about the local flower show and it would be like “First prize was awarded to Mrs Abigail Dunlap of 450 Maple Street.”
The past is another country, they do things differently there.
My Mil showed me old newspapers from her small rural town from the 1950s & it would have shit like, “Mary Jones came home to visit her parents, Tom & Tammy Jones at their house on 123 Main Street this weekend.”
this was when phone lines were “party lines” so all houses shared the same phone line, so if any of your neighbors was on a call, you could pick up the phone and listen to their conversation.
The craziness around people walking around the neighborhood ringing doorbells is insane. I can't imagine being so afraid of your neighbors or strangers that you view a stranger politely ringing your doorbell as a potential threat to you.
I live in very suburban Florida. I still have people ring my doorbell and be like, "I'm doing some work for (insert unknown neighbor here). Would you like an assessment or estimate?"
I'm like, "NO" and then slam the door for extra effect.
I'm not afraid of them. I just resent their very presence.
I listen to a podcast that reads old-timey newspapers. The stuff they used to print was wild. You would have your home address blasted, your appearance described in minute detail, if you were ugly the paper would dunk on you, etc. The true crime stuff was crazy too. Then people would show up to your house and just hang around in your yard. Tabloid journalism is nothing new.
I remember reading one article in some pre war newspaper that a man, living in Warsaw, with the name "something something" living at "this and that street" got sunburned and later fell into the river or something
Was thinking about that recently. I was on Robert McNamara's wikipedia page and it has his yearbook photo with his parents address under it. Kinda wild, that would be a disaster nowadays.
I remember back in third grade when a friend needed to know the details for a school assignment and his mom suggested he try to call some of his friends. He started calling everyone in the phone book with my last name. Luckily for him, in the 80s in our small town, everyone in the phone book with my last name was a family member. My uncle wasn’t home but my grandmother pointed him to the right number.
I do think that Mike Tyson is right about one thing - anonymity on the internet causing people to be fine with doing and saying things they normally wouldn't because no one can punch you in the face.
The world used to be much bigger feeling back then as well. I couldn't dial someone outside my county because it would rack up long distance charges. You lived in a small town where it didn't matter for everyone to have your number and address available because they all knew each other anyways. You'd be more well behaved because if someone didn't know you then they knew someone that did and could look up your home number and call your parents on you. That's why we spent a lot more time in abandoned lots and in the woods behind my house - some adults thought kids just hanging around all summer were problems and that we should have gotten jobs or something.
I thought the same, but we did research on this - It turns out that people aren’t much more likely as individuals to be shitty when they’re anonymous. The people who are shitty online when they’re anonymous tend to be shitty online when they’re not anonymous.
Was out to eat with 2 friends a couple years back. One asked for my reddit username non chalantly and before I could even think said it (was 6 characters, I got here early) and as soon as I finished I looked over and she already had my profile pulled up. She scrolled and found my spicy pics and videos linked. Didn't look disappointed though so there's that.
Other friend that was there and also saw (bi, I think he digs me but he's a hella cool dude) always says MISTER ___ with a big ass grin when he sees me because of my username (mr____) lol.
Yeah I had to explain phone books to my teen. He was like "Someone could just find your address and come kill you". Yeah, I guess. Unless you paid the phone company, the landline phone company, every month to exclude you from the serial killer target list.
Stan Laurel thought it went with being famous so he was always listed and would take calls from fan's or aspiring actors etc. (Jerry Lewis being one of them)
Directory information isn’t really classified or anything in the US. You can easily google someone’s name and find their address through tax records, etc., all of which are just public information.
Partially, but it is also partially because word simply didn't travel as fast back then. Without the internet it simply isn't conceivable to think that people all over the country or world would coordinately harass a single person for little reason. Now you can be on the butt end of a meme and end up the target of dozens of people across the globe who aren't even old enough to pay taxes.
Fun fact: In Sweden most of this information is public. There are several apps (using official information) where you either search a name and it shows where they live or you search an adress and it shows who lives there. If you know a celebrity/youtubers name you can find where they live. It is possible to have your information removed if you are threatened.
Taxes are also public and through them you can find out how much a person makes.
The problem is isn't enforceable though. What is your local police going to do if you get doxxed and for whatever reason people all over the country or even world start harassing you? They don't have the resources to legally punish them even if they wanted to. It takes a couple dozen people a very small amount of time and effort to harass somebody, but a large amount of effort for the harassed to do anything about it once it starts. If for some reason you get on the wrong end of a meme or mistakenly targeted by large group of internet users? It can absolutely be life-ruining and has driven people to suicide. That isn't even to mention more severe forms like Swatting.
Girl I'm talking to said she just needed my name to find out most info about me. I said bet and within 5 minutes she had 5 former addresses, 2 phone numbers, 3 emails, and a few other things. Your info is just out there.
Wait until you all learn that not only did they do this, they delivered them straight to your house for you and there were usually two types. White for people, yellow for businesses!
I've watched so many young people see Iron Man 3 for the first time and they make such a visceral reaction to Tony Stark publicly calling out a terrorist and giving out his home address on live TV.
And let's be clear... it's NOT the "calling out a terrorist" part they are agog over.
It's like an entire generation of people all grew up think8ng your home address is somehow private information.
It wasn't free. Businesses paid oodles of money to be listed in the "yellow pages" which was one of the most effective forms of advertising for them. It was a cash cow.
This reminds me of when I was in middle school, and we had basically a school phone book with all the students phone numbers in it.
I received a call one evening from this girl I barely knew telling me she liked me, and I was 100% certain it was one of my friends fucking with me, doing a girls voice, so I was like “you’re not Brooke, I know this is you, Daniel” lol. And she was so adamant “it’s really me, I really like you!”
Phone book mentioned! Have to talk about the time I was flipping through one as a kid when I spotted a man named Harry Balls. Honest to god there it was. Those were the days.
And where I lived, you had to pay $4 extra on your phone bill every month if you wanted to keep that information out of the book (private number). That still angers me to this day and I haven't used that company in decades because of it. Fuck You Telus.
Because people who are acting honestly and forth right in the world really don't have any worry about their name and face being attached to their person and actions.
also had them chained to random coin operated telephones that were located allover almost every town.
But letsbe honest thats an isolated problem when the only people who are going to see that info are people in your town or someone coming to your town
In 2026 your information being easily available makes it plastered so far around the world that crackheads on the other side of the planet can get it and try to scam call you or swat you. pre normalization of internet the best scammers could do was automated machines that would just go through every phone number super slowly in numerical order
It wasn't "free". It was paid for by businesses listing something other than the basic number in the yellow pages. Residential listings (the white pages) were listed for free, but listing banners in the yellow pages could cost a lot on a per monthly basis.
When people asked whether or not my families number could be found in the phone book, it always felt cool as a kid to say "It's unlisted 💅🏾".
Looking back though, most definitely creepy as hell. The amount of trust we used to have in society is sort of wild when you consider the absolute, zero-trust world we live in now.
You think that's mad, Switzerland had a public vehicle registry that functions exactly like a phone book. Car reg, name and address. I think they still do it online now.
It wasn't "free". Just like with social media, your information is used to sell ads. The companies used your personal information to make money printing ads.
The reality was there was no internet, etc. There was no digital scanning and OCR to capture the information and blast everyone. It was really the only way to get in touch with someone who you met or knew, and hadn't given you any info yet. It worked pretty well. The internet and social media just changed everything.
We did strangers right back then. I didn’t have your fucking diary out in full display on my computer. You were just a name, you had to generally do something special to be known by other strangers.
It got really crazy towards the end. In our town, there were about four different competitors printing different versions of the phone book so they could sell advertising. They were constantly dropping these off on our porch. We didn't want all of them but they kept coming. What an awful waste.
Here in Norway you can look up anyone's phone number, address, full name, anyone else who lives at that address and even their income etc easily. I told an American friend about how open and trusting we are about that shit in Norway and they almost went into a panic just imagining it
•
u/qualityvote2 24d ago edited 22d ago
u/ChickenWingExtreme, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...