Yellow was for business. The giant white book was for people.
I mostly remember them being combined into one big yellow book, but separated by page color (yellow for business, white for personal).
Wasn’t part of it pink too? I can remember what that bit was for.
That was what we used before Grindr.
The paper cuts were the best part.
I don’t remember pink, but we had blue pages for government listings.
We had the backpages. That was for health & wellness services mostly.
Bring me the blue pages! But don’t bring the red pages! Don’t trust Sirrus!
I can hear this comment so clearly lol
I think it depended on how big the city was for if they were separated or not.
It’s interesting how universal the use of colour was. I grew up in a smaller province most people don’t know (or at least can’t spell). The phone books were made by a crown corp that was pretty much just for the province. Yet, same colour schemes. Outside of the book was yellow. White pages for people, yellow for businesses.
We had the same (all yellow, but personal part was white, or at least as white as the shitty paper could be). But they were called “Golden pages” instead (“Žluté” (yellow) vs “Zlaté” (golden)), probably because in our language it sounds better.
Czechia btw.
In Norway there was one big book. Can’t remember the "catchment area. White pages where private, yellow businesses. Last one published in 2009, tho smaller one for local district was published until 2017
Thank you! These kids don’t know shit nowadays!
Don’t they yeah this stuff in schools anymore?
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
I moved the house landline to a Google Voice account 15 years ago. Set it to DND so all calls go to voicemail. G transcribes any actual words and emails me. spammers leave a few seconds of silence usually. I mark them as spam but they call everyday from different numbers so fuck me, no text transcribed, ignore. if a person leave a silent voicemail, must not have been that important. house phone never rings. bliss
because we got to a point where a majority of our calls were shit we didn’t want.
Holy crap… so much this. I despise cellphones for this very reason.
Telemarketers have existed for a long time, and they would usually call during dinner. We would answer because there was no caller ID and thus no way to know if it was somebody we knew or not.
And then we hung up.
What’s changed are three things:
- There used to be an upcharge for long-distance telephone calls. So even though telemarketing calls existed, they wouldn’t be long-distance calls from some call centre across the country because that would be prohibitively expensive for the marketer.
- Calls used to be metered and charged by the minute or by the call. Every time a call was connected, the clock started ticking and the phone companies started billing. That means it wasn’t economical to make thousands of bulk cold calls because you’d have to pay a nickel per minute and that would cost a lot of money and labour. On top of that, the people you’d call would get angry at you for wasting their airtime (especially on cell phones) and thus would likely not buy whatever you’re selling anyway. On top of that, angry people would sometimes get revenge by faxing you pieces of black cardstock.
- The telephone network was analogue and physical. Nowadays you can outsource cold calls to a foreign country and sign up for a VoIP service that lets you make hundreds of calls a day through automated dialling completely anonymously, whereas just a few decades ago, you’d have to purchase a physical dialling machine for hundreds of dollars, hook it up to a physical telephone line, and call customers knowing that they can trace your calls back to you, and on top of that, successfully sue you for $500 per unsolicited call (in America) under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act 1991.
Are you sure you don’t want to switch your long-distance provider?
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.
This comment will be searchable one day if it’s not already. With LLMs I’m not sure how it won’t be possible to match writing styles, formats, vocabulary with natural progressions in these over time.
TLDR: past anonymity is no guarantee of future
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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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People don’t realise that the power AI will or already has is like the predator having the capability of searching and killing each fish indivually if it chooses, or leaving just 3 select ones out of an entire school of fish. It will only go after 1 or 2 to begin with under the watch of a human but once it’s deemed safe to be autonomous it will scale.
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I agree it should but let’s not forget the people who own the ai have a vested interest in keeping the bubble alive and growing
I hate you and how right you are.
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.
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…
Don’t make claims you can’t back up.
In this persons defence it’s like them claiming you could have a tumour removed from your brain to save your life. Then you reply prove it. Then they say I’m not a surgeon. Then you say don’t make claims you can’t back up. There are steps missing in the logic
There’s a world of difference between leaving enough info in Public Internet for some rando to find you and needing a search warrant. It’s trivial to check someone’s comment history on reddit for selfies and start looking for landmarks. I’ve always kept a hard divide between anything that has my real name and my shit posting.
Yeah he’s just be a cunt that pretends he doesn’t understand nuance to feel superior. Still plenty of that from reddit here
Don’t ask people to doxx you, you are the one standing in a field during a thunderstorm.
And I can fully back up my claim of having no experience in doxxing.
You are the one that ends up in trouble by acting tough guy, when someone with too much time on their hands posts your details on pastebin.
You sure I’m the one acting tough? I’ve simply never shared personal information. I grew up when the idea of putting personal pictures with names online was taught to kids as dangerous. It’s takes effort to doxx yourself and I’ve never done that.
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.
I totally agree with the third point, but that’s not anyone.
Anyone with a purpose, and money.
Those are some pretty sizeable caveats lol
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.
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.
Was that guy the owner of the wow armory? Because otherwise… how did they get your cookie store inside your browser?
Was that guy the owner of the wow armory? Because otherwise…
No, he was another player/customer. See below.
how did they get your cookie store inside your browser?
When you pull up a character on the Armory inside of the cookie/memory information was a list of all the other characters for that same account/character. And anyone can pull up any other account characters name on the Armory.
My guess is the list of all the character names for the account was there so if you wanted to switch between one character to another from a drop-down UI object.
My point is developers can leak additional information assuming that users can’t see it because it’s not displayed on the UI, but if somebody goes into the developer mode on the browser they can inspect all the memory/cookie information for that web page.
Finally, this was a long time ago, so who knows if it still works that way today or not. My point of mentioning it was as an anecdote on how additional information can leak in ways we wouldn’t suspect.
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.
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.
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.
Tbh they did say someone, not everyone.
Real smooth, Philip
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.
That was actually the idea behind the “right to be forgotten” ruling in the EU: The original case was an IIRC Spanish restaurant owner, quite successful, but when he googled his (quite unique) name the first hit was an article about his first restaurant going bankrupt 20 years ago. Back in the days if you were a journalist investigating the guy you’d figure out that he once had a restaurant in town soandso and then rummage through the town’s newspaper archive and find the article, and then decide whether it’s relevant and how to handle it, now everyone and their dog is finding it by accident. And clicking on it, meaning it will stay the first hit because for google clicks mean that things are relevant.
Seems like the average young person is fine posting photos and videos on all the social media platforms journaling their whereabouts and habits too.
Heh. The German Pirate Party had an ideological split over that one, the majority vs. the data protection critical twits (they reclaimed the term twit for themselves after being called exactly that). Their blog is still up. The idea of post-privacy is that at some point, noone will fucking care because everyone has their skeletons not in their closet but hanging from the balcony… which isn’t a bad state of affairs in itself, but going all accelerationist on it isn’t the greatest idea.
On the flip side you had a second rift line, that between the majority and the tinfoil hats – a very loud minority, not just because of all the crackling. The kind of people who thought that it should somehow be possible to be a politician, vote on party policy etc. and still stay anonymous.
at some point, noone will fucking care because everyone has their skeletons not in their closet but hanging from the balcony… which isn’t a bad state
No, it’s not a bad state, if that would be true for everyone. In reality, only poor and average people will have a graveyard balcony. The rich people will still hold their secrets.
Or… everyone, rich and poor, don’t hide their skeletons anymore, because people just… don’t care anymore. We are over-flooded by information. Doesn’t matter if it’s useful or not. Actually I’m impressed how Israel’s actions were decisive in stopping the Ukraine-Russia war. I have not heard any news about that war on the media for a week, so the war it’s over, Russia went home, right?
If Nixon was the President today, he wouldn’t even think of resigning.
The kind of people who thought that it should somehow be possible to be a politician, vote on party policy etc. and still stay anonymous.
I don’t know how it is in your place, but here this is mostly possible, depending on where you draw the line.
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?
Don’t worry, I’m just joking with you.
I guess I’m too quick to defend my lower back pain and strong opinions about people on my lawn…
What are these things you call ‘pages’?
Are they like screens?
And iirc you had to pay to get your number listed as private. Like blackmail
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)
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So I can finally rip a phone book in half without remembering the technique?
Remember leave little gaps before tearing.
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What the fuck, they do cell phones now
Mine’s not there. Some woman with almost the same name as me, yeah. Maybe you have to go off the grid for 14 years and the government just forgets you.
Don’t see why that would have mattered, though, as long as I have no death certificate and yes registered address/phone number.
A bunch of my tribe was missing, we don’t have a super popular surname but there’s a lot of us, regardless.
It looked like it was mostly the older older folks who still have landlines? Because we haven’t had one for so long I can’t even remember
Which is why I’ve never used social media that requires a phone number.
Unfortunately they have our info from friends and family that share contact permission without though.
Except here’s no bleed through from the user names I actually use online to my family members or irl acquaintances. Separate emails, separate identities.
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Holy sweet Jesus they seem to have so much info. I’m generating my report now, so I’ll update this when I look through it
Update: you have to pay $25 to get your report so I no longer care
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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.
And now people willingly dox themselves on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Tinder, Grindr, etc.
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.
No idea why they did it.
Vision of the new oil.
I absolutely don’t get what my parents have to do with oil barons, but okay.
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was pretty accurate that any phonebook entry that used first initial, last name was a woman. self-defeating obfuscation
You could have opted to be unlisted.
For an extra fee! That’s right, they charged you to do LESS work!
