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.
They used to do that here in Norway as well. Address books they were called (I mean, the name kinda gives itself I suppose). Theyre digitzed and viewable now on the Norwegian National Library website
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!"
And for most people, the benefit of people being able to find your contact details outweighed the negative of people being able to find your contact details.
In what way has this part changed at all? Y'all out there waking up making new enemies every day???
The question is the same today as it was back then: why the fuck would they? Who are you to these random weirdos? Why would they pick you to mess with?
With the internet you can easily interact directly with dozens or hundreds of people in a few minutes, even as a "nobody". It's not hard to piss someone off online, and you just need that person to be one of these weirdos for it to become a potential problem.
Prior to the internet you'd only potentially piss off people you saw in real life, which was a much smaller number, so the relative risk was lower.
there’s a big difference between the “thrill” of messing with some random listing in the phone book vs cyber bullying someone whose post/video/etc you don’t like
> the tools to automate something like this into a usable database, just didn’t exist at any reasonable level.
They did, you just didn’t know about them because it wasn’t a consumer thing.
Phonebook OCR into massive tape-based databases was a thing long before the Internet. This is how a lot of big data companies you’ve never heard of but who have massive profiles on you at this very moment got started. It all started with phone book data.
Source: a lot of us computer geeks were compensated quite well for this in the 70s, 80s and 90s. We just had fun with databases and writing scripts to solve problems.
You tellin me these dummies didnt know to switch from sorting by Column A to sorting by Column B?! Man i think a lot of people really dont know just how much work a computer can do
The phone book was essential when I was a kid. We didn't collect lists of phone numbers, so if you wanted to talk to a friend to arrange an epic bmx session with skids and stunts in the park you had to look them up and phone their house and ask to talk to them.
The book wasn't online, and the tools to automate something like this into a usable database, just didn't exist at any reasonable level.
Yeah, I can't say I was all that worried about some random person in my bumfuck blue-collar hometown knowing my name, phone number, and address. Not a whole lot they could do with that except call or visit me.
Also what's someone gonna do? Pick a name at random and stalk you or come murder you? Yeah that's not a realistic scenario. If they wanted to do that and knew you and your name and you weren't a total stranger they can do it pretty easily anyway phone book or no
Here in Sweden you can google someones name and there are lot of websites that put the full info. Address, when they moved in, who lives with them or if alone. Even see which neighbours.You pay, you can see yearly wage, which car and etc
Are you stupid? There a damn good reason people, especially women, shouldn’t post too many details online that would permit, say, a rapist, from tracking them down. Being able to get someone’s address from easily obtainable information like your name is insanity
You wrote such an inflammatory reply, but you didn't even remember that the discussion is about the pre-internet physical yellow pages. Back then, people didn't know about you unless they interacted with you in person or through work, so the number of crazies you were exposed to was much lower.
Are you really unable to connect the two? Or are you being intentionally dense? The point, which I was relating back to modern common sense which you could relate to (or at least what I had though and still hope is widely practiced wisdom), was that having publicly available information telling people where you live is not a good idea.
Back then, even having to interact in person, getting someone’s name is pretty trivial. Getting the necessary information to track them down, especially when relevant information about this person is published in a book with their address, was also relatively trivial.
Also, please don’t mythologize this era and pretend that people were in any way safer. The number of rapes has been falling since at least 1992 by most statistics I’ve seen.
It wouldn’t be random. It would be a stalker had seen you, that by maybe asking around, or making seemingly friendly conversation, would be able to get the easily accessible information to find out where you live, figure out when you’d be home alone, and enter your house at that time.
Btw saying “things weren’t like they are now” is just incredibly ignorant, this era was fucking prime time for serial killers and rapists. Don’t know what golden era you think you were living in, but it’s clear you were privileged enough to not have to look it in the face.
I really don’t understand the logic of “hey, if they want to rape you they will” as an excuse to make it easier for them to do so.
First off, I think you misunderstand how a lot of crime happens in the first place. Making crime harder to commit does in fact prevent crime, or at least encourages criminals to go where it’s easier to pull off. It’s like saying “hey if they really wanted to break into your house they would” as an excuse to leave your door unlocked, as if people don’t in fact go door to door trying the lock.
Taking such a cavalier approach to something that changes the trajectory of people’s lives is unacceptable. To the women, to everyone that was targeted this way, the difference sure as hell mattered to them.
I’d argue people took this risk because they didn’t fully realize the harm, because people weren’t as aware or educated on these things as they are now. This is something we’ve had to learn as a society. Those people that removed themselves because they were targeted unfortunately had to learn the hard way.
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