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We used to pick up every call back then because 9.8/10, it wasn't some scam call
Seriously. People make up all kinds of explanations for why no one actually uses phones but few seem to have noticed that it's because we got to a point where a majority of our calls were shit we didn't want.
Kinda the same thing with the mail. My letter carrier gets irritated that I don't empty my box everyday, but he's the one stuffing it with two pounds of trash every day. I get like two letters a week they are actually relevant and the rest is garbage or actual dangerous Identity theft risk they I have to destroy.
Well, that and I never really liked being held hostage on the phone by family I'm not even super close with. They stay safely tucked away and out of my business on Facebook now lol
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White pages are where people doxxed themselves.
Yellow pages were business listings. They were also sorted by category, then alphabetically within a category, which is why so many businesses names started with "AAA."
So in movies where people flip through giant yellow phone book and try to call everyone with the same name in the area is a LIE?
I think they eventually started combining them for payphones.
They were frequently combined, the white pages were people in the local area and the yellow pages were businesses. I don't actually remember seeing white pages in any phone booths or by pay phones but that may just be where I lived.
Some of us who lived in that era and who are tech savvy think the privacy paranoia is little more than the equivalent of TSA's security theater at airports.
There is nothing stopping anyone from finding out exactly who you are, where you are, and what you're doing. We all carry locator devices today that never existed in the era of the phone book.
Our social security numbers weren't in databases with internet exposure where financial companies with information "security" could have them leak. Everyone's has leaked now.
A lot more people than you'd think are easily googled right down to address, family names, current phone number, past addresses... you name it. Leaks happen every single day and big data is everywhere monitoring your everything.
Having your name, address and home phone number in a book that only has regional numbers and isn't widely distributed beyond the local scope is the the smallest privacy concern.
Seems like the average young person is fine posting photos and videos on all the social media platforms journaling their whereabouts and habits too.
There is nothing stopping anyone from finding out exactly who you are, where you are, and what you're doing.
All right prove it.
Post my real name, real home address, and my current location.
There's nothing stopping you, apparently.
I'll do a proof by counterexample. I have no idea how do to that, therefor there is in fact something stopping someone from finding out exactly who you are, which proves the premise to be false. QED mothafucka.
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To find you attackers would:
- Look through your 868 comments, from that they can build a persona.
- Start looking for alt accounts on the fediverse using that information.
- Could be you were active on Reddit/twitter/facebook they could probably find you there, even if you deleted all your posts/comments.
How much have you doxxed yourself through the years?
Then do it. I used the same username reddit. Last time someone tried to prove it, they got the state wrong and I never even tried hiding that.
Naah, I got better stuff to do than snooping at you 🕵️
And I'm not experienced in it, so it would take a lot of time learning the craft. Those series don't watch themselves you know...
Something really freaky happened to me back on Reddit. I don't think I posted anything that was too personally identifiable. About as close as I'll get is saying that I live in red-county in Colorado and am a Broncos fan. Then one day on a fairly niche gaming subreddit, I mentioned how close something in the game was to a nickname that people called me at work, and said something like "hopefully my coworkers never find out about this in the game or I would never hear the end of it." Then someone responded, "see you at work on Monday [my first name] ;-)"
I still have no clue how that happened. I went back through every comment I had ever made and not once did I post where I worked or what my first name was. I'd never once told any of my coworkers my reddit user name either. It was a bit of a privacy eye-opener for me to realize that even if I thought I was posting anonymously, someone could still potentially find a way to tie my online persona to me.
Most likely scenario is they saw you browsing Reddit at work and saw your username on the screen. Reddit leaves the username out on the main page.
I still have no clue how that happened.
Might be worth your time to go to the gaming subreddit on your web browser and then use the development mode of the web browser to inspect all the cookie data.
The company might be putting more information in there than they show on the screen, that could be available to anyone who can do a search on their website for your characters name.
For example, once I was playing World of Warcraft on an alt, and I argued with a tryhard player about being nice to other players. The WoW Armory, when you look up the alt's name, adds in its cookie/memory the name of all the other characters for that same account (to populate a drop-down selection). So that guy started harassing me on my main character without having never knowing its name.
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The simplest explanation is probably that even though the subreddit was niche, the reason you are on it is connected to your demographics, which you share in common with coworkers, making it more likely for one of them to also be browsing it.
a) That would be in violation of Lemmy.World rules and get instant deleted and banned.
b) It would put the poster in legal trouble.
c) Hello, Snowden, PATRIOT and PRISM.
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In both cases it comes down to being lost in the crowd.
In the 1980s only celebrities worried about having their information in a phone book. That, and maybe people with really unique names. That's because getting the information out of a phone book was tedious. The only entity that presumably had a searchable database (other than maybe the NSA) was the phone company. They weren't necessarily trustworthy, but they had better ways of making money than spending all kinds of computer power on individual people. If you wanted to backwards-search a phone number it was an incredibly labour-intensive process without the database.
These days people are much more careful about certain aspects of their identity, but share other things. The thing that's the same is that picking any one person out of a crowd is still hard.
Any one fish in a school of fish is relatively safe from predators because there's no reason for a predator to target them specifically. Or, like the joke about running away from a bear: you don't need to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other guy. In this case, you don't have to be a completely locked down target, you just have to avoid standing out and being an obvious target.
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hey OP, you're so young you don't even know the difference between white pages and yellow pages!
It made sense to me because the phonebooks were yellow in my area! The pages inside were divided by yellow for business and white for personal, but my mental image for phonebooks are big and yellow.
Don't forget the blue pages (municipal/government)!
I just wonder what the short kids are going to sit on?
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We actually just got our yellow pages in the mailbox last week or the week before, I think. I was baffled. I was like they still MAKE these?
Shit was no thicker than an old GamePro magazine. Just the businesses who are still buying ads I guess.
They're STILL going?!
THEY ARE lol, we actually kept it because we couldn't believe it. No intention to ever look at the thing, just a "how funny is this" moment.
(Disclaimer: Canada)
So I can finally rip a phone book in half without remembering the technique?
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Whitepages still keep all your info, so people can still dox you old style.
God the old days.
I was in 9th grade, went to school with the girl I liked. She was shy, but cute and fun. I asked her out, and was flatly refused.
Starting the next year, I changed districts. Thought about her a lot for a couple years. Broke out the phone book and searched her last name. Went through about 6 before I found her and asked her out again. We dated for about 3 more years until things started getting pretty serious and I decided I wasn't ready to get married in my teens.
Also had one for our junior high. Used it to ask a girl out and failed 😅
I am sorry to hear that…, still plenty more girls in the book! 😊
Bro, I'm in my 40s now; that book has numbers for totally different people now 🤣
Fresh batch of potential candidates.
I remember for a brief time Google offered up names, addresses, and phone numbers in their search results. Then after like a year (maybe less?) people decided to get freaked out over it. They offered a way to opt out, then just removed it entirely.
I also remember back in the 90s, my mom and stepdad buying a 7 disc set of phone numbers and addresses. No idea why they did it... But it was a thing.
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was pretty accurate that any phonebook entry that used first initial, last name was a woman. self-defeating obfuscation
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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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