In fact, City Directories were much more comprehensive, from the end of the 18th century. City Directories can contain people's exact home addresses, their occupations, and places of employment. The directories were a combined white pages-yellow pages even before the phone company got in on it.
Traditionally, in most small towns, privacy has meant something entirely different, because all the residents of a town knew everybody else's business, whether it was from open sharing, gossip, or low-tech spying. People in a small town do not have freedom of movement or freedom of anonymity. There is no crowd to blend into.
Yep, surely you also know the world has changed dramatically since then too, especially in regards to information security. International automated scraping and spam, identity theft and even stalking are now international activities. People weren't under such high pressure from information threats in the ye olden days.
Name and phone numbers are Personally Identifying Information in most countries with strong privacy laws, for me I cannot store that info privately without consent let alone make it public.
I'm not denying that this is theoretically possible, but I have never experienced nor heard of anyone for whom this was the case. It does not seem like it would be workable at all tbh.
