[beardyw]

Because people have been living in houses for millennia and such an idea of privacy would only have emerged in the last few decades.

[13of40]

In fact, only two or three decades ago it was standard for the telephone service to print everyone's name, address, and phone number in a big book, distribute it to every house and charge you $5 a month extra if you wanted to opt out of the list.

[Gibbon1]

In the past I've tracked down the names of people in old photo's with a viable house number by guessing the city and searching newspaper archives. Then confirm with a streetview. The archives will have articles mentioning people with their street address.

My thought is Americans have become really paranoid compared to people 50 years ago. And people are often under the illusion that people can find out a lot about you with little effort isn't true.

[jfengel]

Computers have made a lot of information that was theoretically accessible into pragmatically accessible. There was a kind of semi privacy that is changing. Some have adjusted by insisting that it was genuine privacy all along. Others don't care that semi private is now public, largely because they still feel pragmatically anonymous and unthreatened by what isn't.

Neither is entirely wrong, but the ones with the strongest feelings either way don't do a great job of taking the others into account.

[wizofaus]

I still remember those days quite clearly. Including the fact we virtually never got spam calls.

[paleotrope]

Local calls were free, long distance calls were not. The likelihood of spammer being in your local area was really really small.

The result of being able to call millions of people from anywhere in the country for essentially free is why we have spam calling.

[wizofaus]

I think it's fair to say in general the tele-comms industry has dropped the ball on ensuring phone calls are actually being used the way they were intended to. 80% of the calls I get I don't even bother picking up any more, and at least 70% of the SMS messages I get are phishing or spam.

[smugma]

<15 years ago a friend went and got thousands of signatures to make phone books opt in vs opt out in SF. He did some sort of stunt where he collected over a thousand phone books and took a picture of them in front of city hall or other public place.

[furyofantares]

I can't remember street addresses being included in the 90s. So maybe 4 or 5 decades ago for that?

Is a phonebook with just numbers that different than a facebook search, which afaik you can't opt out of? It feels like it is, but I think only because having a phone became a basic necessity. Structurally the phone network seems very similar to signing up for a social network and the phone book very similar to being able to search for other people.

[vel0city]

There were addresses in the books I got in the 90s and early 00's.

[lxgr]

The idea of a property register is much younger than a few millenia, though, so that's not a good argument for its default privacy level.

The United States are also younger than even a single millenium.

[jltsiren]

I would guess that the idea of a property register is about as old as the idea of formal land ownership. Ancient Rome definitely had property registers, and it was probably not their original idea. After all, maintaining records of land ownership for purposes such as taxation and military service was one of the core functions of many ancient states.

[lxgr]

Yes, but not all property registers in the world are public (or at least web-accessible).

[Tagbert]

Among the few documents that we have of the “dark ages” period in Anglo-Saxon Briton are the property deeds and grant documents. It gives us a little glimpse into the lives, politics, and language of the period that we would not have otherwise. Consider future historians before we hide more records needlessly.