Exposure

 Some time back, I handed off a pile of technical magazines to a co-worker. This week she went through them, tearing out the stories she wanted to read, and putting the rest in recycling. Tearing out the articles of interest would not have occurred to me, but seemed practical.

She then brought me the front covers of the magazines, thinking that since they had my name and address on them I might want to shred them. I said that people still publish phone books, and that my name, address, and phone number appear in those. This had not occurred to her.

Given her age (somewhere in her thirties), she may never have paid for a land line, and so may never have appeared in the White Pages. When I first showed up in the local White Pages, maybe forty years ago, it did not feel like a breach of privacy, it felt as if I were getting somewhere in the world. Of course, the means of automatically collating information have greatly increased in power and fallen in price by then. But my name, address, and phone number are the least of the information that is now easily found on the internet.