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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).
Wasn’t part of it pink too? I can remember what that bit was for.
That was what we used before Grindr.
The paper cuts were the best part.
I don't remember pink, but we had blue pages for government listings.
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.
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."
So in movies where people flip through giant yellow phone book and try to call everyone with the same name in the area is a LIE?
I think they eventually started combining them for payphones.
They were frequently combined, the white pages were people in the local area and the yellow pages were businesses. I don't actually remember seeing white pages in any phone booths or by pay phones but that may just be where I lived.
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
Telemarketers have existed for a long time, and they would usually call during dinner. We would answer because there was no caller ID and thus no way to know if it was somebody we knew or not.
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.
This comment will be searchable one day if it’s not already. With LLMs I’m not sure how it won’t be possible to match writing styles, formats, vocabulary with natural progressions in these over time.
TLDR: past anonymity is no guarantee of future
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.
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.
Don't forget the blue pages (municipal/government)!
I just wonder what the short kids are going to sit on?
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.
They're STILL going?!
THEY ARE lol, we actually kept it because we couldn't believe it. No intention to ever look at the thing, just a "how funny is this" moment.
(Disclaimer: Canada)
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.
Also had one for our junior high. Used it to ask a girl out and failed 😅
I am sorry to hear that…, still plenty more girls in the book! 😊
Bro, I'm in my 40s now; that book has numbers for totally different people now 🤣
Fresh batch of potential candidates.
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.
was pretty accurate that any phonebook entry that used first initial, last name was a woman. self-defeating obfuscation