this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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Would you mind posting your phone book and a copy of all your text messages here for us all to read? Can we see your photo album, all credit card transactions, amazon purchase history, GPS location data, credit score? We promise only to sell this info to other people, use it to sell you stuff, raise your insurance rates, tell us where to focus our funding for political campaigns. Don't worry, we'll only save it forever and you can be assured that we'll feed this into AI models 10 or 20 years from now, along with everyone else's data, establishing a massive cache of information from which incredible inferences will be possible. We may or may not use this information to enrich ourselves, increase wealth inequality, influence politics. You should surely not take steps to limit the data being collected about you. Just relax your body. Let it happen.
Did you know that before cellular phones were a thing, the phone company regularly sent out books with everyone's name, phone number, and sometimes even their address in them?
You could even find such a book in public in these little things called "Phone booths".
You've missed the point. The phone numbers are not the valuable information. What's valuable is the list of each person's social contacts.
You've missed the point.
The point is the useful trivia I just told you.
To really drive in your point, why don't you post the names and phone numbers of the three people you contact most frequently. Don't worry, those numbers are already in the phone book. It's ok, you're just sharing publicly available information.
And people were concerned. My grandpa only had initials published not his full name because he knew some widows [when my mom was a baby] afraid of crime who only published their initials and wanted to make things harder for those criminals who targeted on widows.