Comment by noisy_boy

> but there were no privacy features before. so we’re actually still much better off than we were for hundreds of years before this.

If you are choosing hundreds of years ago, when we had no computers and internet, I wonder how we had worse privacy than the surveillance world today.

> so we took the census for centuries before this point, and it was “ok.”

Yes because we didn't have computers to unearth patterns in the data in a millisecond and politicians could have their career ended for doing the wrong thing, when revealed, instead of being rewarded for it.