That wasn’t even the point I had in mind when I started writing this piece. I kind of worked up to that conclusion the more I thought about it. It really was reckless/terrifying that literally anybody could get your home address just by picking up a commonly available book.
The first time I used the Internet regularly was in 1990, when I was a graduate intern on a Navy base. I used to access Usenet pretty routinely. Back then, the Internet was not widely used outside military and academia. People used to include their real names, their employers, office phone numbers, and frequently, physical mailing addresses in their .sig files. Definitely not something people do now.