Comment by SoftTalker
3 hours ago
The US used to be more this way. Not brokerage accounts as far as I recall, but whether you own a house, how much you paid for it, your address, phone number, even your SSN didn't used to be considered very private, people had it printed on their personal checks, and schools used it as a student ID number.
Newspapers used to publish hospital admissions and discharges, nothing medical but names and dates. Probably a lot of other stuff I'm forgetting.
Let's not forget white pages, those door stopper telephone books containing everyone's name, phone and address that everyone had (along with yellow pages for business listings).