[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.