Q: There used to be city directories and then there were telephone directories and now there is no way to get the address or phone number of an old friends or missing relative. Is there anyway you can get this information without paying for a criminal check or 10 other things you do not want? — GradyJB
Tech+ Funny thing that technology. By moving the world online and making it easier for people to socially share way too much information, it’s no longer easy to find a friend’s phone number. Or at least an accurate one.
In fact, modern life may even offer extra privacy (excluding covert government spy operations). The deluge of data means it’s difficult to decipher accurate information from who knows what.
To find the best free and mostly accurate details on people, the best source may still be the phone book. Here in Denver, phone company CenturyLink sells its customer data to Dex Media, which operates dexpages.com. The site puts the actual phone book online. Dex Media also buys landline residential customer data from AT&T, Verizon, Frontier and FairPoint Communications in other parts of the U.S.
“As each book publishes, (Dex) takes down the old one and puts up the new one,” said Sheila O’Leary, CenturyLink’s director of print directories and digital advertising. “It goes up in December and down the following November. The data for (dexpages.com) is as accurate for the day the book was published.”
CenturyLink’s agreement dates back to when the major telephone service in Denver was called Qwest. Qwest sold its directory to Dex, which puts its all online and it still publishes phone books. To stop receiving a phone book, consumers can opt out at yellowpagesoptout.com.
Outside of former Qwest areas, CenturyLink sells its residential customer data to people.yellowpages.com/whitepages, or Yellow Pages.
Mike Konidaris, director of print services for Dex Media, says people still seem to like phone books.
“And some people are now preferring them to the internet,” Konidaris said. “When you do a Google search (on a business) you get all these people who are not really local because they paid to be there at the top. It’s kind of ironic, but people get frustrated by that and go look it up in the book because that’s local.”
Such directories however, don’t publish numbers if the customer requested an unpublished number. And yes, there is still a charge for that.
Ultimately though, more people are canceling their landlines and switching to mobile. And mobile services are limited when it comes to selling customer data.
Konidaris said creating a wireless phone directory of users is near impossible because the actual mobile customers must opt in — not the customer’s carrier.
It’s also illegal to robocall wireless numbers, according to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.
“In a landline world, it was completely different. Listings were published and if you didn’t want it published, you had to pay to have it not publish,” Konidaris said. “With wireless, it’s flipped the other way. The numbers are not available.”
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