Comment by alkonaut
9 hours ago
These services were just the natural extension of the phonebook. At the exact same time as the phonebooks stopped being circulated, these services popped up online.
And since everyone's name, address and phone number was in the phone book (At least for their city) people didn't find it weird when it popped up online. Sure, to do the same thing for the whole country you'd need dozens of phonebooks for different areas, but it was just the same information.
Which makes me wonder: weren't there phonebooks in US cities and in other countries before? Were they incomplete/opt-in?
The key thing about the Swedish phonebooks were that they were opt-out, so people were basically all in the phone book. So even before the internet, it was just very natural that your name, address and phone number was public. "Getting someone's number" as in moves and TV wasn't a thing. You could just call anyone if you knew their name.
Yes, we had phone books. And it was useful. But they didn't generally include personal information such as birthdates, salary, etc. And it was easy to opt out. Additionally there were not a bunch of online services with financial impacts that used phone numbers are primary keys.
And, importantly, they were physical in a time when it was hard to collect and collate the data in all of them. In 1990, there were about 5,000 distinct "white pages" phone books in the US. And OCR was pretty crappy.
Also, in all the places that I lived, mobile numbers didn't end up in the phone books, only residential landlines did. I don't know if that was universal.
Right. It was harder to spoof my bank (since banking was an in-person affair), and steal all my money back then. Now, this information is available to anyone in the world, and there aren’t good protections. I don’t know the solution, but the world is a different place than it was in the days of white-pages.
In the UK, you could always choose to go 'ex-directory'. More and more people did over time I think and the personal part of the phone directory got slimmer and slimmer, basically just leaving the business part.