Privacy is never just about keeping things secrets, it is just as much (or more) about protecting against bad outcomes. A typical example is that we can share t

Privacy is never just about keeping things secrets, it is just as much (or more) about protecting against bad outcomes. A typical example is that we can share the most intimate information to a doctor, but would feel a great sense of privacy loss if they in turn shared the information to someone else. Small villages and towns has a lot of norm enforcement. A member of the group can't talk about anything just because everyone know everyone's business. There are a lot of complex rules about what information can be used when, where and how. In sociology, gossip is commonly referred as the practice of norm enforcement. The information that get shared is not random. The stuff that get inferred, the anonymity that cities provide but small towns don't, is context dependent on what norms exist. The surveillance state however do not care about that context. It will take anything and use it anyhow it want, and that scares both people in the small town as well as people in the cities.