Internet Pedantry Alert: That’s the white pages. The yellow pages are for business listings. You could, and still can, opt out of the white pages listings.
I still find it crazy that those books existed in the first place.
When I grew up you only needed a name and you could look it up in the yellow pages to get their phone number and address.
However, where I lived it was possible to opt out from this.
Back in the AOL days, the first iterations of Google had built-in white pages lookup, for everyone, where if you put in a landline phone number you’d get their name and address. One of my first experiences on the internet as a kid was talking people from AOL chatrooms into sending me their phone number, googling it, and sending back their name and address with some nonsense about being from the FBI. Really freaked people out.
I mean Elon Musk is an asshole but is this really an issue? I mean there were the yellow pages which basically doxxed everyone technically…
Internet Pedantry Alert: That’s the white pages. The yellow pages are for business listings. You could, and still can, opt out of the white pages listings.
I still find it crazy that those books existed in the first place. When I grew up you only needed a name and you could look it up in the yellow pages to get their phone number and address.
However, where I lived it was possible to opt out from this.
Back in the AOL days, the first iterations of Google had built-in white pages lookup, for everyone, where if you put in a landline phone number you’d get their name and address. One of my first experiences on the internet as a kid was talking people from AOL chatrooms into sending me their phone number, googling it, and sending back their name and address with some nonsense about being from the FBI. Really freaked people out.