I believe the world is way more anonymous now when I grew up you could basically take the phone book look a name up and just call them. That's now mostly impossible.
Well, that's one specific communications channel. You mostly don't socially call people out of the blue outside of a very tight circle of friends and family--and cell phone numbers can't be looked up in general. However, many people--especially professionals--have LinkedIn profiles. And many in general can be searched on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Given someone's name and maybe a little more information about them, you can often look up a lot more than a phone number and address.
The point being was there used to just be a big book with everyone in it, and now there isn't, and probably never could be again with how we all now feel about and regulate data privacy.
There are so many services now that have data scraped from various sources - many of them charge money, but they're readily available, even with increasing privacy laws.
> The point being was there used to just be a big book with everyone in it
There was never a big book with everyone in it. Maybe everyone in your city (more accurately, every household). But it was never even close to the scale of the internet. Linkedin has orders of magnitude more people than your phone book ever did.
Do you honestly think that you can't find out a heck of a lot more about people in general quite easily than you could in the white pages? (Which also required you to know the town/city where they lived.) For one thing, if you own a house, that's a matter of public record. Fortunately most of the deep search tools have gone behind paywalls but it's still trivial to find out a lot about someone especially if they have an uncommon name or you already know something about them.
Not really. I had to look up the addresses of 50 distant relatives for sending out a graduation announcement and it was almost trivial to find everyone (along with their past addresses and possible associates). It just isn’t on well-known sites.
