As far as copyright, small snippets of information or sentence fragments are not copyrightable, but collections of data are. >Society might grind to a halt, we

As far as copyright, small snippets of information or sentence fragments are not copyrightable, but collections of data are. >Society might grind to a halt, we would be inundated with virtual and physical pop-ups asking "your landlord wants access to your phone number to place a call to you, will you allow it?" That is how messaging works on many newer systems like Facebook or Instagram, and people appear to find that level of control desirable, not annoying. The only reason the phone system works with public numeric IDs that anyone can dial is that whole thing is a relic from 50 years ago.