Why has the attitude to personal data changed?

Question

Law in IT

Before, when there were no cell phones, there were such things - city telephone directories. It was possible to find out the home (office) phone number of any person or organization.
One of the most popular stories related to this is the call from Steve Jobs to William Hewlett.
But over time, everything has changed. Mobile phones have appeared. The number of subscribers of fixed and cellular networks began to grow. There was e-mail, the Internet.
Then came today with apps, social media and more.
Now people are trying to hide their phone number, email address, name, but at the same time they can engage in naked exhibitionism on social networks.
What happened? A passport or social security number has always been a closely guarded piece of information, but finding a person's contact information is no longer a trivial task.

Answer 1

The attitude has changed from the fact that most lawyers, unlike most IT people, study philosophy and are familiar with the laws of dialectics, one of which (taken from Hegel by Engels) says that quantity inevitably turns into quality :)
In full accordance with this law they, as the amount of available personal data increased, formed a secondary market, i.e. began to actively protect our privacy from ourselves (convincing us of the fabulous value of our personal data and the exceptional importance of protecting it), for which they charge a modest fee. If it goes on like this, we should expect the disappearance of signs with street names and house numbers from public access and administrative responsibility for signing documents with your name and passing urine tests in polyclinics.
It remains only to hope for another law, from the field of self-regulating systems: when we (as a society) return to the level of savage tribes that consider the name of an individual to be a sacred secret, the number of lawyers may be reduced and the system may switch to the "bonus game" mode.

Answer 2

The whole problem is the speed of dissemination of information. If earlier you recognized the number of a beautiful girl, then the maximum that you could do was write her number on the wall and attribute something. Now all personal data gets into directories on a computer, with auto-search, with auto mailing lists, and so on. Fraudsters use this, they take it not even by cunning, but by the number of divorces and so on.

Answer 3

Supporting @iiiil . A couple of years ago, the term "threat scalability" even appeared.