It snuck up on us, or rather, it was quietly imposed upon us by profiteers whose meteoric growth was celebrated by all power structures.
Into the early 2000s, everyone still knew never to use a real name online. Murderers would probably get you or something. Don't want randos knowing you you are. Besides, handles were cooler. Some well known people had publicly known aliases, but aliases were the norm... like on HN.
In my bubble, it was FB that really broke through this. I heard about fb as a social network, but with real names. That way you could friend people from real life. It was actually quite a revelation, like a public address book... very useful.
Anyway... Zuck is, IMO, more of an "eye for the tides" guy than the tide itself. He realised that "relentlessly cataloging and indexing information about every single person on the planet in a way that anyone can search instantaneously" was happening and he decided to be there first.
Definitely pretty much everyone was anonymous on warez boards and the like. On the other hand, a lot of local BBSs actually had something of a local community in real life as well. And the people accessing Usenet from corporate and academic accounts often used their name and affiliation.
In the mid-2000s I was at school, where we were simultaneously being taught (in 'Information and Communication Technology' lessons) never to use a real name online [0], and signing up to Bebo & MySpace with our real names.
It's (there beginning to exist people) growing up with the internet that all but killed that, I'm sure of it.
[0] with some limited web ring/social network type site for schools, for which we given aliases and then, I don't know, wrote BBcode and marquees and stuff about our school-safe interests and hobbies
It's like in the story about the frog in the pot of hot water, if someone keeps telling the frog, "you know, that water isn't going to stop getting hotter," and the frog is saying "seems fine to me, I think you worry too much."
that's overly broad. although i particularly dislike dichotomies, we can draw a simple one here for illustrative purposes: there's public and private information, and omni-indexing/-archiving is the "wrong course" only for private information, with private information encompassing more than just sensitive data, including any personal information a person chooses not to divulge publicly.
humanity has absolutely advanced from indexing all public information, even considering the exponential rise of disinformation and idle bullshit. instantaneous knowledge coalition and mass multiway communication are the two astonishing advances stemming from the internet. and now we're dealing with the inevitable but unintended negative consequences of these amazing advances.
This is what the classical public/private dichotomy is missing: the social information strata of "local community only" information that gets lost when we convert everything to the Internet. Without a Community context, there is no safe place from haters. Searching a Community's content should not be possible from a Worldwide context.
My comments on HN are Community, not Worldwide, but modern search indexing has no grasp of the difference between those two, and lumps them both together as Worldwide — what your dichotomy calls "Public". Yes, some people will intentionally write content for Worldwide consumption, but the vast majority of my written words are intended for Community consumption only. We see this every day, when some unwitting soul on Twitter gets their off-the-cuff Community-context tweet selected as Trending and the entirety of Worldwide descends upon them. Even celebrities, people who specialize their career in producing Worldwide content, have started to realize that they, too, need Community-context spaces to live and breathe in, and that online social media is not a safe Community space for them.
What is an example of a healthy Community space, on today's Internet, that protects against the content discovery efforts of Worldwide haters, while still allowing new participants to join the space? (Certainly it's not HN, which is trying and failing to be a Community space operating in Worldwide context.)
ps. I forgot Secrets!
Secrets are mine to divulge in the Worldwide context, and no one else's. My biometrics, my medical records, my fetishes would all be good examples of what we would expect to be kept Secret. I understand and accept that some Secrets will be upgraded to Community context in the matter of course of human sociology, and I don't expect idle gossip to end. But I have every right to expect that my Secrets will not be divulged to the world, even if they're known to my Community. Unfortunately, due to search engines deciding that all Public content is therefore Worldwide, all Secrets that are shared within any private Community will end up indexed for all the haters to find. That's a very lonely way to live, not being able to be vulnerable within a Community. No wonder people use Facebook; it offers a well-known Community context (private groups) that's not searchable from a Worldwide context.
But I agree with the overall point, that archiving is distinct from indexing, and we need better mechanisms than copyright to take down content given many services terms allow content to be kept forever and/or make it hard to delete content uploaded by others. This might come down to free speech vs privacy, though.
Unfortunately, both archive.org and the affiliated Archive Team now intentionally ignore robots.txt files.
Archive Team, in particular, wrote a very irritating and condescending screed called "ROBOTS.TXT IS A SUICIDE NOTE" [1]. Apparently, they don't understand that not everyone wants their stuff backed up forever and they treat anyone who disagrees with them as a moron. And that manifesto wasn't written by some random team member, it was from Jason Scott himself.
I know that Archive Team isn't officially part of IA, but they are tightly integrated with their archiving operations. It's a bad look.
Except... not. All too often, we see stuff people did or wrote years ago being used against them. Those things may not reflect the person they are today, and that's even worse than "hat[ing] with perfect precision."
The second and more serious problem is people thinking that algorithms are so smart that are infallible. This, when a much more sophisticated human brain would have a serious trouble trying to navigate the long lists of random dictionary words that we enter in a browser.
Netizens in general don't understand, or don't care, and just simplify and fill the gaps until they have a caricature that can fit in some "well known stereotype" slot. The result is that our societies are being more and more fractured, radicalized and isolated into different groups.
I wonder why white pages fell out of favor. Maybe the global access made them a bit too invasive, or people voted with their feet. Or switched to mobile phones which did not do this.
That sort of information is regularly bought and sold today. A breach that's just names, addresses, and phone numbers will draw a few headlines, some comments on HN, and a bunch of scolding tweets. But I don't imagine most people see that as particularly sensitive information in most circumstances. (Some exceptions of course such as the fact that you're in a particular database is itself sensitive.)
A database feeds more evil than a printed book could, even if scanning/ocr it were feasible.
People could look up numbers online if they wanted to, so there was just no need for a big book any longer. They also never had cell numbers so they became less useful in that regard. And most people don't just call a person out of the blue any longer.
I also suspect that by the time cellphones got big, the public overall wouldn't have been big on cellphones numbers being listed.
This old article https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2001/06/why-isn-t-there-... claims that the wireless carriers didn't want to put out a directory because consumers would be upset if they had to pay for junk calls.
A huge percentage of society is willing to accept anything Facebook, Google, and Apple throw at them and simply don't care about the present and future ramifications. Some think about it, others enjoy the convenience or think that there's no way it can harm them. Some even drink the cool aid and honestly believe surveillance is good for society.
I fully expect to wind up in a future where we're all starring in our own versions of the Truman Show. Sensors everywhere, constantly streaming our choices and preferences. Our health data, associations, and even thoughts and feelings used against us.
When everyone is watching everything you do, you're no longer free.
Including one of the largest power structures, "users who enjoyed the convenience of finding people."