&gt; However, things get really rough when cities happened<p>When did &quot;cities happen&quot;? Rome had more than a million residents about 2,000 years ago. Cities like Athens and Alexandria had over 100,000 residents centuries before that. I think I understand the point you&#x27;re making, that anonymity within a community is easier to achieve when the community is large, but that&#x27;s not the only anonymity available.<p>Before cities, we already had anonymity due to fleeting associations (e.g. nomadic groups,  traveling merchants), due to separated communities (e.g. soldiers did not know each others&#x27; past, their homes would not have known their actions), or due to migration (e.g. leaving one community and joining another).<p>Those forms of anonymity have mostly disappeared, not because &quot;cities happened&quot;, but because of better administration. So far, our administrative capability has always been limited by the amount of effort it required. What has changed with the Internet is that we now leave a (digital) papertrail of almost everything we do, so there is no longer an effort-based limit on the amount of records we can preserve.<p>That to me is what makes Cerf&#x27;s comment unpalatable (I hadn&#x27;t encountered it before): to pretend that &quot;we&#x27;ve never had anonymity&quot; is foolish at best, and manipulative at worst. Given his current employer, I&#x27;m more inclined towards the latter.<p>Another poster already commented that &quot;what we now call privacy, used to be called freedom and liberty&quot;. I think that&#x27;s a very good one-liner, but it&#x27;s not really accurate: privacy is a requisite for freedom and liberty, but it&#x27;s not the same thing. This is probably the first time (since the StaSi) that that requisite has come under so much attack, which is probably why it&#x27;s receiving so much more attention than before.