Comment by sib
5 hours ago
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.