You are not insane. The part you have trouble articulating I think revolves around 3rd Party Doctrine, and the complete seeming death of professional discretio

You are not insane. The part you have trouble articulating I think revolves around 3rd Party Doctrine, and the complete seeming death of professional discretion. When I was growing up, you wanted to keep records? Paper, or get out. So people only tracked the important things. Queries happened at the speed of a human being able to synthesize information, etc. Further, if you wanted to cross-reference different sources, you were doing footwork, which meant you were doing that one thing at a time. Nowadays, we've massively parallelized the data collection, classification, cleaning, organizing, and cross-referencing to the degree that about the only thing standing in your way is learning the names of providers with the juiciest datasets. The Internet did it's original job maybe a bit too well. Information is propagated without any sense of discretion in the name of financial viability. Walking things back... Well... The only option is to destroy the data itself. By it's very existence, by collecting it, it destroys any semblance of privacy. Cellular technology in particular is a glaring example of a set of data that never should have been made queryable, but here we are.