5 ms·

> everything I used to be able to get in a phone book Fair, although you could opt out of the phone book. (And I don't think they had location/address, though

by _moof 5y ago

> everything I used to be able to get in a phone book Fair, although you could opt out of the phone book. (And I don't think they had location/address, though it's been so long now that I can't remember for sure.) > I think people are grappling with the fact that the Internet just makes data scraping and processing possible on a scale previously unimaginable This is it right here. The scale and ease of access are terrifying. It's true that in the olden days, someone could follow me around and write down everywhere I went, everyone I talked to, what stores I went to, my hobbies, and so on. But someone would actually have to do that, and they would have to single me out, and even then the information they collected would be in a notebook, not distributed to virtually every human on the planet. Now we are all being followed, all the time, and all of that information is available to anyone with almost no cost or effort. This is a sea change, and personally I find it horrifying. There are very, very few people I would trust with that much information. I definitely don't trust the whole world with it.

tiernano 5y ago
> Fair, although you could opt out of the phone book. (And I don't think they had location/address, though it's been so long now that I can't remember for sure.) you can opt out of Facebook too... and Irish phone books had addresses...
- _moof 5y ago
  It's not just Facebook. Your phone is tattling on you 24/7. ALPRs are recording where you drive. Browser fingerprinting is creating a profile on you even if you block ads and trackers. Short of never using a computer, there is no opt out anymore.
  - mitchitized 5y ago
    "Ooh, lookit that funny car over there!" - points phone almost at your face, takes picture - uploads picture to Facebook You'd literally have to have the kind of Momma that would dig a hole and hide you in it at birth to really be "off the grid" at this point.
  - admax88qqq 5y ago
    That's a little different thought and I think you know it. There's a difference between information that government and big tech is scraping and storing, vs information that is publicly available to literally any random person online to scrape. Both are problems, but those are different discussions and we started with talking about the issue of truly publicly available information. I think that's an interesting topic that merits its own discussion without falling into the surveillance discussion once again.
    - _moof 5y ago
      A little different, yes, but what I'm saying is that it's not substantially different. Once data is collected, it won't be uncollected, and all it takes is one hack to permanently turn a private database into a public one. And the data that's being collected in these private databases is often justified on the grounds that it's not private information--i.e., if you're outside, you have no expectation of privacy. So in that sense it is "truly public" information. But what I'm saying is that the meaning of public/private has fundamentally changed because of the kind of differences of scale we're talking about here. In other words, there was a degree of implicit privacy afforded by the level of effort required to catalog and search "public" data. Whether that data comes from public or private databases is, I think, not particularly relevant.
      - admax88qqq 5y ago
        Sure, yes, I don't disagree with what your saying. It's just that corporate surveillance is like the favourite topic on HN right now. Almost every topic gets shifted to being yet another debate about corporate surveillance. There is an interesting discussion to be had about what it means for information to be public, since public information is also now _searchable_ information, which never used to be the case. What are the implications for that when it comes to laws about what constitutes "public" information, and social norms on what we share publicly. But once again instead of discussing that conversation, we're dragged back into the corporate and government surveillance, yet again.
    - debaserab2 5y ago
      The former can become the latter pretty easily though and without any consent through both illegal (hacking) and legal (company acquisition) ways. Corporate surveillance very much is a part of the problem and you can't talk about one without talking about the other.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  you can opt out of Facebook too This is not true. Facebook builds profiles about millions of people who have never had a Facebook account. For example, people who happened to be in the background of a photograph taken by a stranger. Another example: people who installed an app on their phone without knowing that it included a Facebook SDK that was tracking them. This is nothing new. It's been discussed in public, and even before the U.S. congress. Personally, I'd love to opt out of Facebook. But I can't. Because I can't log in to my Facebook account, and Facebook ignores my requests for access. I even did the "send in a picture of your government ID" route, and nothing happened. So please inform me how I can opt out of Facebook's data gathering.
  - r00fus 5y ago
    Yes, shadow profiles exist and really show how shallow Facebook's promises of privacy are: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-profiles-zuckerberg-congress-data-privacy https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-...
drfuchs 5y ago
Home addresses were absolutely shown in Bell Telephone White Pages phone books delivered to just about every domicile in the USA each year; you could not opt out of receiving the White and Yellow pages, though for a fee you could be “unlisted” and not appear in them.
aazaa 5y ago
> And I don't think they had location/address They most definitely did have addresses.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  This info had a logical purpose also. Phone books without location and address would be mostly useless because lots of people share the same name. To find the phone number of a friend having just "John Smith, USA" would be impossible (or would annoy thousands of people and require months of calls).
jiveturkey 5y ago
> you could opt out of the phone book. Which cost money! Being listed was gratis.
cafard 5y ago
They did have one's address in the phone book. Now, you had to have a decent city map, and some sense of the city numbering scheme to know where that address was.
- jobigoud 5y ago
  Most city maps I used would have a street index and a grid coordinate system overlaid on the map so you would only search within a square like "D5" for example.
cvs268 5y ago
> And I don't think they had location/address, > though it's been so long now that I can't remember for sure Same here. initially i too couldn't remember for sure. Then i remembered the scene from Terminator 2 (1991) in which it looks up Sarah Connor's phone-number and home-address in a phone-book! :-)
- Strs2FillMyDrms 5y ago
  I believe the LGR channel has shown some DOS programs from before 1990 that had the entire catalogue of the US phonebook available in a neat DOS UI, where you just choose a location/state (or non at all) then enter a letter and it would filter every entry on the chosen filter... (Name was ProPhone 1993, so not really pre 90's) https://youtu.be/yBupNdYe08g?t=1078 https://youtu.be/yBupNdYe08g?t=1078
  - alfiedotwtf 5y ago
    Yep, they were called Reverse Pages. You would buy the CD, and then just read the database yourself. This allowed you to type an address and you could get their phone number etc
  - alfiedotwtf 5y ago
    Yep, they were called Reverse Grey Pages. You would buy the CD, and then just read the database yourself. This allowed you to type an address and you could get their phone number etc
  - alfiedotwtf 5y ago
    The ones in Australia where one way - you could search for a name and it would give you a phone and address... but if you a programmer, you could read the database directly, so search on a phone number and get back the address and name, or search an address and get back name and phone number. There were a few services in the early 2000s doing this, they were called Reverse Grey Pages
  - kbenson 5y ago
    I think we actually had that, bought on a whim by my Dad at a computer show in the 90's. We had some fun looking up how many people with certain first/last names were in the US, but didn't have much other use for it. And funnily enough, family members of mine have started multiple businesses named A-1 something. :)
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Yeah, strong agree from me. What is weird to me are so many of the responses to my comment are along the lines of "But the real danger now is that all of this data can be correlated with other sources of info, and it's all instantly searchable." It's weird to me because that's the point I was trying to make in my last paragraph, to explain that that really has nothing to do with Facebook. The "hackers" aren't even claiming there was a breach, just information they screen scraped. The ability to amass giant databases of information and make it available to the world to search is something fundamentally inherent to the Internet.
PeterCorless 5y ago
All listed numbers in the White Pages had street addresses. Having an unlisted number was a premium service — you had to pay to be private.
- p49k 5y ago
  Sure, but you weren't in the white pages if you weren't already paying for a phone. At that point the question of whether you're getting a discount for agreeing to be in the book, or paying not to be in the book is just an arbitrary distinction.
tyingq 5y ago
> And I don't think they had location/address I lived in a lot of different places in the US in the 70s and 80s. All the phone books had residential addresses listed. This is the format and font I remember: https://groovyhistory.com/content/50602/01af8c322a21e50d0b81254ccf42839b.jpg https://groovyhistory.com/content/50602/01af8c322a21e50d0b81...
- JohnFen 5y ago
  Yes, they did (at least in my part of the US). But... you could tell the phone company not to list your address, and then they wouldn't. If you wanted to pay a monthly fee for even more privacy, you could have your number unlisted entirely.
  - Aerroon 5y ago
    And because families shared a phone only some family members would be listed in it.

by _moof 5y ago

tiernano 5y ago

> Fair, although you could opt out of the phone book. (And I don't think they had location/address, though it's been so long now that I can't remember for sure.) you can opt out of Facebook too... and Irish phone books had addresses...

_moof 5y ago
It's not just Facebook. Your phone is tattling on you 24/7. ALPRs are recording where you drive. Browser fingerprinting is creating a profile on you even if you block ads and trackers. Short of never using a computer, there is no opt out anymore.
- mitchitized 5y ago
  "Ooh, lookit that funny car over there!" - points phone almost at your face, takes picture - uploads picture to Facebook You'd literally have to have the kind of Momma that would dig a hole and hide you in it at birth to really be "off the grid" at this point.
- admax88qqq 5y ago
  That's a little different thought and I think you know it. There's a difference between information that government and big tech is scraping and storing, vs information that is publicly available to literally any random person online to scrape. Both are problems, but those are different discussions and we started with talking about the issue of truly publicly available information. I think that's an interesting topic that merits its own discussion without falling into the surveillance discussion once again.
  - _moof 5y ago
    A little different, yes, but what I'm saying is that it's not substantially different. Once data is collected, it won't be uncollected, and all it takes is one hack to permanently turn a private database into a public one. And the data that's being collected in these private databases is often justified on the grounds that it's not private information--i.e., if you're outside, you have no expectation of privacy. So in that sense it is "truly public" information. But what I'm saying is that the meaning of public/private has fundamentally changed because of the kind of differences of scale we're talking about here. In other words, there was a degree of implicit privacy afforded by the level of effort required to catalog and search "public" data. Whether that data comes from public or private databases is, I think, not particularly relevant.
    - admax88qqq 5y ago
      Sure, yes, I don't disagree with what your saying. It's just that corporate surveillance is like the favourite topic on HN right now. Almost every topic gets shifted to being yet another debate about corporate surveillance. There is an interesting discussion to be had about what it means for information to be public, since public information is also now _searchable_ information, which never used to be the case. What are the implications for that when it comes to laws about what constitutes "public" information, and social norms on what we share publicly. But once again instead of discussing that conversation, we're dragged back into the corporate and government surveillance, yet again.
  - debaserab2 5y ago
    The former can become the latter pretty easily though and without any consent through both illegal (hacking) and legal (company acquisition) ways. Corporate surveillance very much is a part of the problem and you can't talk about one without talking about the other.
reaperducer 5y ago
you can opt out of Facebook too This is not true. Facebook builds profiles about millions of people who have never had a Facebook account. For example, people who happened to be in the background of a photograph taken by a stranger. Another example: people who installed an app on their phone without knowing that it included a Facebook SDK that was tracking them. This is nothing new. It's been discussed in public, and even before the U.S. congress. Personally, I'd love to opt out of Facebook. But I can't. Because I can't log in to my Facebook account, and Facebook ignores my requests for access. I even did the "send in a picture of your government ID" route, and nothing happened. So please inform me how I can opt out of Facebook's data gathering.
- r00fus 5y ago
  Yes, shadow profiles exist and really show how shallow Facebook's promises of privacy are: https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-profiles-zuckerberg-congress-data-privacy https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-...

drfuchs 5y ago

Home addresses were absolutely shown in Bell Telephone White Pages phone books delivered to just about every domicile in the USA each year; you could not opt out of receiving the White and Yellow pages, though for a fee you could be “unlisted” and not appear in them.

aazaa 5y ago

> And I don't think they had location/address They most definitely did have addresses.

pvaldes 5y ago
This info had a logical purpose also. Phone books without location and address would be mostly useless because lots of people share the same name. To find the phone number of a friend having just "John Smith, USA" would be impossible (or would annoy thousands of people and require months of calls).

jiveturkey 5y ago

> you could opt out of the phone book. Which cost money! Being listed was gratis.

cafard 5y ago

They did have one's address in the phone book. Now, you had to have a decent city map, and some sense of the city numbering scheme to know where that address was.

jobigoud 5y ago
Most city maps I used would have a street index and a grid coordinate system overlaid on the map so you would only search within a square like "D5" for example.

cvs268 5y ago

> And I don't think they had location/address, > though it's been so long now that I can't remember for sure Same here. initially i too couldn't remember for sure. Then i remembered the scene from Terminator 2 (1991) in which it looks up Sarah Connor's phone-number and home-address in a phone-book! :-)

Strs2FillMyDrms 5y ago
I believe the LGR channel has shown some DOS programs from before 1990 that had the entire catalogue of the US phonebook available in a neat DOS UI, where you just choose a location/state (or non at all) then enter a letter and it would filter every entry on the chosen filter... (Name was ProPhone 1993, so not really pre 90's) https://youtu.be/yBupNdYe08g?t=1078 https://youtu.be/yBupNdYe08g?t=1078
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  Yep, they were called Reverse Pages. You would buy the CD, and then just read the database yourself. This allowed you to type an address and you could get their phone number etc
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  Yep, they were called Reverse Grey Pages. You would buy the CD, and then just read the database yourself. This allowed you to type an address and you could get their phone number etc
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  The ones in Australia where one way - you could search for a name and it would give you a phone and address... but if you a programmer, you could read the database directly, so search on a phone number and get back the address and name, or search an address and get back name and phone number. There were a few services in the early 2000s doing this, they were called Reverse Grey Pages
- kbenson 5y ago
  I think we actually had that, bought on a whim by my Dad at a computer show in the 90's. We had some fun looking up how many people with certain first/last names were in the US, but didn't have much other use for it. And funnily enough, family members of mine have started multiple businesses named A-1 something. :)

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago

Yeah, strong agree from me. What is weird to me are so many of the responses to my comment are along the lines of "But the real danger now is that all of this data can be correlated with other sources of info, and it's all instantly searchable." It's weird to me because that's the point I was trying to make in my last paragraph, to explain that that really has nothing to do with Facebook. The "hackers" aren't even claiming there was a breach, just information they screen scraped. The ability to amass giant databases of information and make it available to the world to search is something fundamentally inherent to the Internet.

PeterCorless 5y ago

All listed numbers in the White Pages had street addresses. Having an unlisted number was a premium service — you had to pay to be private.

p49k 5y ago
Sure, but you weren't in the white pages if you weren't already paying for a phone. At that point the question of whether you're getting a discount for agreeing to be in the book, or paying not to be in the book is just an arbitrary distinction.

tyingq 5y ago

> And I don't think they had location/address I lived in a lot of different places in the US in the 70s and 80s. All the phone books had residential addresses listed. This is the format and font I remember: https://groovyhistory.com/content/50602/01af8c322a21e50d0b81254ccf42839b.jpg https://groovyhistory.com/content/50602/01af8c322a21e50d0b81...

JohnFen 5y ago
Yes, they did (at least in my part of the US). But... you could tell the phone company not to list your address, and then they wouldn't. If you wanted to pay a monthly fee for even more privacy, you could have your number unlisted entirely.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  And because families shared a phone only some family members would be listed in it.