When people started calling my personal mobile number with questions about a voluntary organisation I'm involved with, I was confused: we weren't sharing that number. It turns out that Google had decided to take the number I used to verify my identity for Google Business some years prior and start putting it in Google Search results. WTF, Google?
It’s like having 100,000 yellow pages books. In the days of old you might be able to switch cities if you were trying to evade a stalker. Now you’ll have to change your name, face, and accent.
You can still pay for lookup services. I got a 1-month subscription recently to contact the mom of a friend who disappeared. All I had was the guy’s last name and the town he said his mom lived in. Cost 7 or 8 bucks but it was worth it. So anyway I imagine a stalker wouldn’t need a ton of resources to track a person down using pay services.
If you know the town then in the old days you could go there and get a yellow pages. But your point is valid, because there’s so many other privacy concerns this one is a drop in the bucket. I’m much more scared of the government watching me through my neighbor’s ring cameras just because I said Luigi Mangione is innocent on Lemmy (which he totally is). Or that Elon Musk told us he’s a Nazi sympathizer and I’m repeating what he said, neutrally.