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.

I think it's dodgy as well I'd been job searching and I guess I accidently linked Google somehow, so now the sites completely ignoring the details I gave it and insists on sending everything to my Gmail instead of Proton which I actually ditched Gmail for.

I was really getting into that article, and then it just just suddenly ends. How anticlimactic. I was hoping the article writer was a bit more dedicated towards finding out why Google posted his personal number in the first place...

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.

If it's your personal info, you can ask for it here .
If it's your own website you want delisted, that's here .

Now do the same for bing, ddg, startpage, yandex, yahoo, kagi, brave, ask, ecosia etc etc....

Which is to say, if it's on the internet and publicly accessible, assume it's permanent and going to be indexed at some point.

Isn't it a function of Google Maps that anybody can submit changes to the business informations of a company listed there?

It's like a wiki where all registered uses can suggest contributions.

anyone can make a google company profile. seems like clickbait.

Wait, I suspect that we don't live in the same country.
In Italy keeping the number unlisted was free (you just needed to declare it when you were signing the contract) and I have no memory of something like the 411.

In the US the “standard” low cost line was listed in the white pages by default, you effectively paid extra - per month - for an unlisted number.

As far as I remember in Italy the situation was different.
You can ask to delist the number when you sign the contract and it was free. I am not really sure if in the case you decided later to delist the number you needed to pay a one time fee for that, but keeping delisted was always free.