Before widespread internet it made sense to give out numbers in the White Pages because physical mail forwarding was the other option to find people when their phone number changed. In the internet age where scammers across the globe can and will use personal information to target you for social engineering scams, it is better from a privacy perspective to have phone numbers be information you volunteer to people. There are sites which attempt to catalogue this information and ways to remove yourself from these as well. If a scammer can simply go down a list of most common names and a number string they can more easily make it appear they have a fake Amazon delivery, PayPal transaction, or other pressing issue customized with their name. Most people will not use their critical thinking, and these scams are a big enough problem already.
Before widespread internet it made sense to give out numbers in the White Pages because physical mail forwarding was the other option to find people when their phone number changed. In the internet age where scammers across the globe can and will use personal information to target you for social engineering scams, it is better from a privacy perspective to have phone numbers be information you volunteer to people. There are sites which attempt to catalogue this information and ways to remove yourself from these as well. If a scammer can simply go down a list of most common names and a number string they can more easily make it appear they have a fake Amazon delivery, PayPal transaction, or other pressing issue customized with their name. Most people will not use their critical thinking, and these scams are a big enough problem already.