This could never happen in the old times when you paid taxis with cash. Nobody knew who you were and where you travelled to from where. At some point, there wil

This could never happen in the old times when you paid taxis with cash. Nobody knew who you were and where you travelled to from where. At some point, there will be people who don't recognize that sort of notion of privacy: it will be the norm that each leg of everyone's journey is tracked and recorded. Yet, Uber is super convenient so it's only the logical thing to do today. I always imagined that governments would have to increasingly tighten their grip on control and surveillance to approach that 1984 envinronment which has been looming for a couple of decades now. I would have expected that welfare states where government control is generally considered a good thing and which thus receives little opposition would gradually sink deeper into it――like that frog in a kettle being heated till the water starts boiling――until the contrast to more free countries would be blatant. However, in the last ten years or so, it seems that people, and people even in the more free countries, are volunteering into all that very control by themselves, under the name of convenience. We use Facebook, Uber, Google, Android because it's easy and convenient and opens up social possibilities previously unheard of――surely an argument to be defended――and that is how most of us give up privacy practically for free. Things are generally so well these days that there's little need to worry about privacy in practice. It's only the more dubious circumstances where it suddenly begins to matter who knows what you've been doing and where. In contrast, if an average person is not online today he will partially be an outcast somewhat among his peers. Thus, the social incentives will, in the average, drive people to surrender their privacy online to get connected to their friends. On the other hand, I don't see the online world to be avoided either per se. It's simply enough that there's a backup. If things get bad, you can disappear from online services and revert to seeing people face to face. It'll be a bit more cumbersome but hey that's how it worked for centuries before. My concern there is whether the state itself still supports handling things offline. If you have to be online to pay (lacking cash), or to travel (no anonymous paper tickets), or to drive (no cars without live connection for telemetry, law enforcement and insurance purposes), or walk (face-recognising security cameras everywhere) then it becomes very difficult to revert back to the 1900's. People's behaviour can be reverted but if the non-private way of doing things gets cemented into the fabric of the society in the form of how the state operates, then it will be very hard to opt out.