this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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I understand the story is about google adding a guy's number to a business profile, which seems very odd. But I wonder if anybody here is old enough to remember phone books? I haven't seen one in a while, but in the landline era the phone company used to automatically deliver one to everybody who had a phone. A large physical book with the name, address and phone number of everybody in the local area, except people who paid extra to be unlisted. If you didn't want to look somebody up in the book you could dial a number and a helpful operator would tell you their phone number so you could call them. This was totally normal and didn't bother anybody - how do people feel about that whole concept now?
It's like having 100,000 yellow pages books. In the days of old you might be able to switch cities if you were trying to evade a stalker. Now you'll have to change your name, face, and accent.
You can still pay for lookup services. I got a 1-month subscription recently to contact the mom of a friend who disappeared. All I had was the guy's last name and the town he said his mom lived in. Cost 7 or 8 bucks but it was worth it. So anyway I imagine a stalker wouldn't need a ton of resources to track a person down using pay services.
If you know the town then in the old days you could go there and get a yellow pages. But your point is valid, because there's so many other privacy concerns this one is a drop in the bucket. I'm much more scared of the government watching me through my neighbor's ring cameras just because I said Luigi Mangione is innocent on Lemmy (which he totally is). Or that Elon Musk told us he's a Nazi sympathizer and I'm repeating what he said, neutrally.