And a couple generations back making a phone call was still a pretty big deal and older people remembered how cool it was to be able to send telegrams and a well organized postal service, standards developed in the last couple centuries can't be considered the norm', witihn a couple decades certainly can't.

As for worries about privacy, I well recall how people used to be about satellite surveillance and even cameras in stores and 2-way mirrors, during my youth, and 1984's two-way TV's were written about in 1949 and incidentally people used to be paranoid as hell that the phone company could listen in on their home life. Before that, IIRC, one of the selling points of a public postal service would be more trust that your private correspondence might be read by unscrupulous companies, I remember people worrying the same things about email. It's the new and alien, not the specifics, that cause most of the worries, one would just think that level of culture shock would diminish after a generation or two of Disruptive Technology getting introduced every single year, but rather it seems sometimes like its worse.



I don't even acknowledge a 'digital age' exists, so no. Worries of this sort are not new in any fashion, considering the vast majority of the population has not just believed in a sort of ethereal all-knowing, all-watching, and decidedly judgmental deity, but typically was convinced witchcraft, sorcery, telepathy, malevolent spirits, and all sorts of other stuff allowed their privacy to be invaded. Technology just takes the new shape of sorcery, since it's been a few generations since most of the population found most of our tech intuitively obvious and thus not arcane.

Our ancestors, even pretty recently, were a hell of a lot more of believers in the mystic, back when about the most complex tech they saw was something like a plow or a printing press that's very obvious, people have just transfered that sorcery into tech. Nothing new to it. And while often Bob falling over sick had nothing to do with Jess having placed a curse on him the rational thinker had to consider that she might have actually poisoned him, so too we do have to actually consider dangerous or abusive uses of tech, but moderns days howls of witchcraft 'the power lines made my crops fail and my cows go dry!' can interfere with that. Companies have to worry about boycotts and lawsuits and defamation more than pitchforks and torches but they're same thing.

I don't see 'digital' has much to do with it, beyond being the current flavor of local folklore.



Well now you know. And pretense you weren't implying a non-consensual aspect to this is a bit ridiculous, or at least that the article wasn't, I'll grant you might not have meant as much yourself or tumbled immediately to how such a thing can only be mandatory or done in such a fashion that people voluntarily go along with it for a perceived personal gain.

We wouldn't be having this conversation if they were patenting a TV with built in videophone or a motion sensor that was designed specifically to let it know household member X has entered viewing space and flicked the hand signal for X's preset channel Y. You, and the article, are discussing spying, and if its not non-consensual it's not spying, which would require it be secret or mandatory, and the former is a joke with public patents, modern info access, and fear of various watchdogs groups or competitors gleefully exposing a given company's bad behavior.