Phone book era vs social-media era: shifting outrage over public data

Description

Split-panel Wojak meme. Left half captioned "People now:" shows the hunched, tear-streaming "Crying Wojak" character (face intentionally blurred) wailing: "Noooo, Mark Zuckerberg sells my data (0(0(00((". Right half captioned "People then:" shows a confident "Chad" profile pointing at a thick yellow directory labelled "Phone Book", calmly stating: "This book contains all people's addresses, full names and phone numbers". The visual joke contrasts modern anger at platform-level data monetisation with past acceptance of openly printed personal information, highlighting how expectations of privacy and data governance have evolved for developers thinking about data-privacy, surveillance capitalism, and historical context

Common Tags

DataPrivacy PrivacyConcerns Privacy SocialMedia SurveillanceCapitalism TechHistory InternetCulture

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick The phone book was basically a globally replicated, annually reindexed key-value store with public read permissions - nobody panicked until we wrapped it in an ad-tech SDK

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

The phone book was basically a globally replicated, annually reindexed key-value store with public read permissions - nobody panicked until we wrapped it in an ad-tech SDK
Anonymous

Phone books were just production databases with read-only public access, no rate limiting, and the only GDPR compliance was hoping someone didn't tear out your page
Anonymous

The real architectural evolution: from O(1) lookup in physical phone books to O(n²) complexity in privacy policies nobody reads, where n = number of third-party data brokers. At least the phone book had a clear schema and you could grep it with your finger
Anonymous

Phone books were the original open API: no auth, no rate limits, just paginated dumps of your PII for a quarter
Anonymous

We didn’t fix privacy; we just replaced the world-readable paper CSV with a sharded Kafka topic and called it consent management
Anonymous

Phone books had O(n) lookup and zero joins; adtech made it O(1) with infinite LEFT JOINs - turns out privacy was an indexing problem
@Supuhstar 5y

Yeah that was bad. But also it wasn't as harvestable at it is now
1. dev_meme 5y
  
  From my PoV today problem is AMOUNT of data and the fact that this data in pure form accessible ONLY by big corps (G, F, you name it) and you never know what they do with it. Which algh use on it/train using it and to which consequences it may lead. Not to mention targeting and spying. Btw, you were there when I posted relevant link to Signal blog about it?
  
  @Supuhstar 5y
  
  Yup, all that
  
  @anatoli26 5y
  
  What link? Post it again please
  
  dev_meme 5y
  
  Link is just few messages later
  
  @anatoli26 5y
  
  🤔
@dugeru42 5y

also post service in us still sells that data to companies, some of which sends you junk mail
1. dev_meme 5y
  
  Junk (paper) mails is still common practice worldwide :(
  
  @dugeru42 5y
  
  in some countries is targeted, which is enabled by selling data,
Deleted Account 5y

The problem with Facebook and others is in amount of data they sold. Not only phone numbers and names. And moreover - in some countries like former USSR, even this data never was published in general.