4 ms·

No disagreement with RMS actually, but just out of curiosity: Back when land-line telephone subscription was more popular, did folks used to complain about the

by thearn4 13y ago

No disagreement with RMS actually, but just out of curiosity: Back when land-line telephone subscription was more popular, did folks used to complain about the phone company putting their name and address (by default) in a large directly shared with the entire public? I know you could pay a fee to be unlisted, but didn't it strike anyone as a gigantic privacy issue in general?

ceejayoz 13y ago
Eh, there are plenty of public records - births, deaths, real estate transactions, tax records, lawsuits, etc. It's hard to take a phone book listing and figure out who my friends and family are, who employs me, what I'm doing all the time, etc. as it is fairly trivial to do with Facebook et al.
dredmorbius 13y ago
Tools to automatically search and utilize that data were somewhat limited. There were classes of people who could suppress their listing. And you could (generally) hide behind an initial and no-address listing as well (phone books listed _both_ phone number _and_ street address by default). It was a very, very different age in many ways. What ubiquitous cheap computing and fast connectivity creates is the possibility for thousands to millions of systems to attack a given person simultaneously (DDoS, distributed brute force attacks), or for a very small number of actors (as few as one) to attack from one to billions of people simultaneously. The phone book vector was, by contrast, limited in that: ⚫ It only listed your name, phone number, and street address. Not reams of additional information. ⚫ Utilizing it required a phone call (toll calls, remember those), postage, or a street visit. Attacks, in other words, cost real money (at least for most players). ⚫ There was limited additional data readily linked by those data. Again, not the mebabytes to gigabytes of information in a typical social networking profile. Yes, some players had access to more powerful tools -- but even marketing databases and the like were vastly more primitive than they are now, and hugely less available. Depending on when exactly you're talking about (1930s to 1980s), there might have been some computer capacity, but you'd likely have had to have spent several hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, even as late as the 1980s, to effectively utilize the data in an automated fashion. And yes, there were people who complained and concealed their listings, but the risks were very, very different in magnitude then.

by thearn4 13y ago

ceejayoz 13y ago

Eh, there are plenty of public records - births, deaths, real estate transactions, tax records, lawsuits, etc. It's hard to take a phone book listing and figure out who my friends and family are, who employs me, what I'm doing all the time, etc. as it is fairly trivial to do with Facebook et al.

dredmorbius 13y ago

Tools to automatically search and utilize that data were somewhat limited. There were classes of people who could suppress their listing. And you could (generally) hide behind an initial and no-address listing as well (phone books listed _both_ phone number _and_ street address by default). It was a very, very different age in many ways. What ubiquitous cheap computing and fast connectivity creates is the possibility for thousands to millions of systems to attack a given person simultaneously (DDoS, distributed brute force attacks), or for a very small number of actors (as few as one) to attack from one to billions of people simultaneously. The phone book vector was, by contrast, limited in that: ⚫ It only listed your name, phone number, and street address. Not reams of additional information. ⚫ Utilizing it required a phone call (toll calls, remember those), postage, or a street visit. Attacks, in other words, cost real money (at least for most players). ⚫ There was limited additional data readily linked by those data. Again, not the mebabytes to gigabytes of information in a typical social networking profile. Yes, some players had access to more powerful tools -- but even marketing databases and the like were vastly more primitive than they are now, and hugely less available. Depending on when exactly you're talking about (1930s to 1980s), there might have been some computer capacity, but you'd likely have had to have spent several hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, even as late as the 1980s, to effectively utilize the data in an automated fashion. And yes, there were people who complained and concealed their listings, but the risks were very, very different in magnitude then.