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).
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Real smooth, Philip
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.
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.
So I can finally rip a phone book in half without remembering the technique?
Remember leave little gaps before tearing.
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.
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.
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!
When did yellowpages begin to get phased out?
Yet another business killed by millennials.
Later than they should've. Maybe early 2000s?
Never, if you believe the folks over at yellowpages.com.
The beginning of the end was during the dotcom boom in the late 90s and early 2000s. The yellow pages were one of the very first things to go online. The only thing that kept the physical book going for a little while is that it took a few years before everyone had Internet access.
Unlike some things, this wasn't a case where you needed a critical mass of people online before it made sense to make the yellow pages available online. Instead, it was there from day 1, and it just became more useful / popular as more people came online.
