Hacker News Reader

Phone numbers were never supposed to be secret.

Nor were social security numbers.

We used to put phone numbers and addresses in printed books and give them to everyone.

I remember looking in a 1930's phone book for Zurich, and it even mentions the person's job (I guess for significant jobs like company owner)...

Norway still publishes everyone's tax returns.

But now you need to enter your own tax number to lookup other people's data, and they can see that you've been peeking.

But I suppose one could start a service, so you could pay them to look up a 3rd party's tax returns...

Phone numbers are treated as permanent even though they’re ephemeral. So here we are.