Start? It wasn't that long ago that the phone company published a book with near everyone's phone number in it.

There was no book with everyone's phone number in it. There were many books that covered small regions. If you lived in Oshkosh Wisconsin and wanted the number for someone in Kansas City, or even Madison Wisconsin it wasn't that easy to get that book. Maybe your library had it. Phone numbers on paper aren't that useful. You can't robodial a paper phone book without hiring actual people. But no matter what you couldn't get millions of phone numbers while sitting on your couch, and if you could they would be useless because they were all on paper.

The books were hard to get, but directory assistance did exist if you called the operator.

I'll bet there are quite a few people on HN that have never dialed 411 or 1-<area-code>-555-1212.

None of that let you treat your phone number as anything other than public.

I mean we realize this thread of argument has nothing to do with the point right?

A cell phone number does not equal your kitchen phone in terms of access to information. The whole this is moot. The issue now is that this is my personal phone number, me, personally, and is being used as a piece of validating information in a variety of compromises databases.

This just isn’t true. Ever heard of the Haines Directory?

I used it at a summer job in the late 80’s. You could order reverse lookup books for anywhere you wanted, and of course could get that data electronically too. You could also call information for anywhere you could think of by dialing the area code plus 555-1212.

In my country it is voluntary to be listed in such a phonebook whereas with already a small number of friends the chances approach 100% that at least one of them has my contact info stolen by Twitter, FB, WA, etc. If i dont like this i would have to stop giving out numbers and not be reachable by sms/call.

I have a friend of mine who flat out refuses to give email address or any contact info of the people I meet at his house. It has been a bit annoying one time or two.

Phone numbers used to be really public. As in "Someone has collected your phone number, your address and family name and put it in this huge book they update every year. And they drop a copy of this book on everybody's porch.".

This is completely correct behaviour if you ask me. So you met me at someone's house, so what, it gives you the right to contact me?

You could always ask your friend to relay a message right?

These people I have been seeing them at his house on numerous occasions, we are on a first name basis and open jokes.

It's not like I had glimpsed someone's shoulders and wanted to cold call them to pitch them my startup idea of the week or creepily ask for a date (I remember it was to follow through with a conversation about DIY hydroponic with one and coffee brewing with another). Friend got tired of relaying messages at some point :). We rarely got to the point of giving out contact information on the moment though (that was the flow of those meetings and I think it's not a cultural thing to exchange business card in such settings in my country). Also, we are not the kind of people to hang on facebook, so discovery is weak.

Totally agree it is correct behaviour with strangers though.

And it was only a minor annoyance at some point so well... no biggie. (Except that time he divorced and he wouldn't give me his ex-wife's number so I could get back some DVD she had borrowed)

edit: also, I wouldn't ask for contact info if I wasn't confident that it was okay for the person to get a call from me and I am confident that my friend knows I won't mess up things by being inappropriate.

I see where you are coming from. I just meant as a general rule it is better to not give out people’s information.

The message your friend could have relayed could have been “hey is it ok if I get your contact info?”.

What your friend isn’t getting right is that maybe you and his friends DO want to contact each other. He is deciding for both parties that they don’t. He could adjust his behaviour on that front a bit.

Why not just ask the people directly for their contact information? Or vice versa ask your friend to ask them if it's okay to hand out your contact information?

I've had several friends ask if it's okay to give out my contact information to third parties who were interested in acquiring this information to continue conversations through more private channels.

But there was always an element of consent involved on my part.

> I have a friend of mine who flat out refuses to give email address or any contact info of the people I meet at his house.

Is there a reason you do not ask those people for their contact information directly?

> Well then the obvious solution is to start treating phone numbers as you would an email address - effectively public.

> I would love a version of privacy.com for phone numbers..

I've used google voice and twilio for something similar, though nowhere near as plug and play as a privacy.com-like solution.

I wish there was an easy way to effectively only allow white listed callers to call you directly (and the rest of the calls to go to voice mail). That's what I do with my email at least.

You might find this interesting: https://phoneprivacy.co/

I get nuisance phone calls all the time, it is a lot more disruptive than nuisance emails.