anyone can make a google company profile. seems like clickbait.
I understand the story is about google adding a guy’s number to a business profile, which seems very odd. But I wonder if anybody here is old enough to remember phone books? I haven’t seen one in a while, but in the landline era the phone company used to automatically deliver one to everybody who had a phone. A large physical book with the name, address and phone number of everybody in the local area, except people who paid extra to be unlisted. If you didn’t want to look somebody up in the book you could dial a number and a helpful operator would tell you their phone number so you could call them. This was totally normal and didn’t bother anybody - how do people feel about that whole concept now?
Yes, I remember these (they also send a map of the city with all the street and public transportation lines)
But the point is that you can be unlisted from these (and as far as I remember it was free). Not sure about the part where you can call an operator that tell you the number you are looking for.
Anyway, the problem is that Google seems to have shared the phone number even if the user declined to do so (and by the user account, the number was not listed for years). This just seems a move from Google that show a total disperect of the user decision.
In the US the “standard” low cost line was listed in the white pages by default, you effectively paid extra - per month - for an unlisted number.
The operator information was basically a phone company employee reading the white pages info to you, for a fee.
In the US the “standard” low cost line was listed in the white pages by default, you effectively paid extra - per month - for an unlisted number.
As far as I remember in Italy the situation was different.
You can ask to delist the number when you sign the contract and it was free. I am not really sure if in the case you decided later to delist the number you needed to pay a one time fee for that, but keeping delisted was always free.Italy, and all of Europe, have always had a greater respect for personal and a lesser respect for business’ profits than the U.S.
The phone company definitely did charge extra for unlisted numbers. The number lookup service, which was just called “Information”, was accessed by dialing 411 - the origin of “What’s the 411?” In the olden days you got a human being, then they automated it with voice recognition. In most places 411 doesn’t exist anymore but it was in service until only a few years ago.
Wait, I suspect that we don’t live in the same country.
In Italy keeping the number unlisted was free (you just needed to declare it when you were signing the contract) and I have no memory of something like the 411.
except people who paid extra to be unlisted
With social media, e-mail, and the rest of it “out there” people have started assuming that “unlisted” is the default for voice phones now. Also, in those “good old days” of the ubiquitous phone books, the listings were mostly land-lines, and mobile phones were unlisted by default. Because of the rates charged for mobile calls in the dying days of the white pages, there were even special laws regarding unsolicited calls to your mobile phone.
It used to be difficult AND expensive to get an unlisted domain name as well, but that has been evolving and now it’s a no-cost checkbox option when registering whether you want your contact info to be listed with the domain ownership or not.
Times do change, and while we are generally more exposed than ever, I believe the shifts to more “private by default” configurations of our contact info are a good thing.
