this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
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It's kinda funny how times change.
In Germany, it even used to be that your phone number, along with your name and address, was published in the phone book, by law. If you wanted to be delisted, you had to provide a valid reason, such as being stalked. Just because was not good enough. At every street corner was a phone booth with the phone book of your town with your name and address. At post offices, you could find phone books from other towns. (The phone system was run by the postal service, which was a government agency.)
Phone books were a bit of a plot point in Terminator. The terminator gets the list of Connors from the phone book and kills them in that order.
One thing that never got digitized and put on the internet was the phone book. And for damn good reason.
Yes it did. Data brokers are a thing. They sell your information to anyone they want and aren’t responsible for anything that happens.
I doubt there's anywhere where the phone book wasn't digitized. In Germany, the requirement to publish your address + number was eventually dropped, though; maybe because the phone system was privatized.
I'm speaking of my experiences in the United States. Here, phone books tend to be separated into white pages and yellow pages. The white pages listed names, addresses and phone numbers of private lines, usually homes, and the yellow pages listed businesses. Taking out a listing in the yellow pages was the SEO of its day.
When the internet happened, the one thing that never really happened was a freely searchable database of the white pages. One thing the internet was never useful for as an upstanding citizen was looking up personal phone numbers.