When people started calling my personal mobile number with questions about a voluntary organisation I'm involved with, I was confused: we weren't sharing that number. It turns out that Google had decided to take the number I used to verify my identity for Google Business some years prior and start putting it in Google Search results. WTF, Google?
You can still pay for lookup services. I got a 1-month subscription recently to contact the mom of a friend who disappeared. All I had was the guy’s last name and the town he said his mom lived in. Cost 7 or 8 bucks but it was worth it. So anyway I imagine a stalker wouldn’t need a ton of resources to track a person down using pay services.
If you know the town then in the old days you could go there and get a yellow pages. But your point is valid, because there’s so many other privacy concerns this one is a drop in the bucket. I’m much more scared of the government watching me through my neighbor’s ring cameras just because I said Luigi Mangione is innocent on Lemmy (which he totally is). Or that Elon Musk told us he’s a Nazi sympathizer and I’m repeating what he said, neutrally.