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.