A really interesting statement from Xfinity/Comcast:
We will no longer make available any directory listing information about our Xfinity Voice customers through ecolisting.com, directory assistance, or print publications. This includes names, phone numbers, and addresses. We also will not share any of this information with third-party publishers.
We're making this change as part of our ongoing commitment to enhance customer privacy.
Why is this so interesting? It speaks directly to the issue of unforeseen social consequences and new technology.
Early in the days of pushing the information revolution, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a lot of idea about information and change were bandied about. Two of them, relevant here, were easier access to information generally with phone numbers and addresses as an example, and the other was the end of the paper phone book (saving lots of trees, it was said, more marketing and less fact).
Starting with the paper phone book, well there are giant paper phone books from who knows what advertising-driven company delivered to my door every year. When I lived in NYC, trucks would roll around the city and low-paid workers would deposit phone books on everyone's stoops. I've received them here in Massachusetts as well in the last year. So, no, the phone book did not go away, although the companies, its specific name, and its economic model are very different from AT&T's yellow pages of the 1970s and 1980s that were completely necessary back then.
But free access to information online didn't work out either: when you try to look someone up online, unless they have put their contact information up themselves, it's often paywalled and the Google results usually look pretty dodgy. If you get an unknown phone call (my recent ones are "from" Chicago and Michigan [they almost always fake the source phone number] and feature a recorded message in Chinese with music in the background, which says something about the economics of the phone-spam industry reaching out to non-English speakers in the US) and you Google the number to do a reverse lookup (a simple database operation), it is often very hard to get any information at all, although this could be because the number that shows up on your caller ID isn't actually in service. The point is, you can't actually look people up easily unless they are fairly digitally oriented.
So, we still have paper phone books, but they are not exactly the paper phone books from 40 years ago, and we still can't look people or phone numbers up online (I am tempted to mention the "where's my flying car?" trope, but we have flying cars, it's just that we call them helicopters and they are incredibly more complex than today's regular cars), and, to come back to Xfinity, maybe we don't even want this information available--when it was merely in a paper phonebook, restricted to who had access to those phonebooks, that was one thing, but in today's digital world where Macedonian teenagers can make websites devoted to fake news stories (which are shared to Facebook or via Twitter and then can make their way up the news hierarchy to actual televised news shows), maybe having easy access to everything is not the best idea. (I'll avoid a tangent to how newspapers, despite being driven by advertising revenue, still mostly cared about the advertisements they ran in their pages, but Facebook and Twitter don't see it that way.)
