I've been told back in the day it was quite normal get a physical, dead-tree book with similar information sent out to you every year, until people decided that was a waste of paper.

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consp 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It used to be illegal here to reverse look up a name matching to a phone number, since it was "owned" by the state telephone company and they didn't want that happening. But you were allowed to reverse look up the address of a number and then look up the person and match it to the number. So that magic happened under the hood. The trick was getting the residential information but since that wasn't a problem in the '90s I'm sure it is even less of an issue now.

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SoftTalker 5 hours ago | parent [-]

When I was a kid there were reverse phone books that were indexed by number. Not common, and I think they were pretty expensive, but the IIRC the local public library had them.

	▲	stefanfisk 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		When I was a kid in Sweden that was just part of the local phone book.

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MisterMunchkin an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

But that was optional, you weren’t forced to reveal your location to the person who raped you

	▲	s3p an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Who was talking about rape?