Back in my day, everyone’s address was listed in the phone book. If you wanted to remain anonymous, you had to pay a service charge to keep yourself from being listed!
When I was a kid, nobody thought it was anything unusual to have a reporter from the local newspaper come out to your house and write an article with your home address and phone number.
And now those articles are searchable on newspapers.com!
I do have to admit it was fun finding my mom's old Red Cross activities and my dad's chess tournaments. Any chess players remember Sammy Reshevsky? He was a friend of my dad's and would sometimes stay with us when he visited Eugene for a chess tournament.
Here in Finland the companies operating the phone books and directory services still exist, and you can still search people's phone numbers and addresses online or by calling/texting directory services - just no printed books anymore.
(and you can of course unlist yourself)
I'm somewhat interested, did it go down differently in e.g. U.S., i.e. are directory services gone, too?
In Iceland you can put whatever you want as your job title (or degree) so you have people calling themselves beefcakes, lion tamers, tetris players etc.
It helps to see if you have the right person.
Norway is one such country (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239) but I think some others in the Nordics also does the same, not sure exactly which though and Google is not being very helpful this evening.
It's not exactly true that your salary is public -- what's public is your taxable income, taxable wealth, total estimated tax, birth year and postal code. Various deductions apply to the income which makes it non-straightforward to deduce a person's actual income, and as for taxable wealth the minimums are high enough and deductions are substantial enough (especially if you own a home) that a lot of people with wealth much greater than zero will be listed with a taxable wealth as zero.
Back in my day, everyone’s address was listed in the phone book. If you wanted to remain anonymous, you had to pay a service charge to keep yourself from being listed!