Sure, ambiguous &quot;progress&quot; is being made, but the individuals in those situations don&#x27;t benefit by publicly broadcasting their activities.<p>This entire &quot;progressive&quot; attitude that everything continually gets better, besides being based on this recent most-peaceful time in history, relies on individuals pushing forth and <i>being</i> the change to their local social groups while <i>simultaneously</i> hiding from the larger social machines that would <i>quickly</i> squash them. The individuals in these situations would be ill-advised to widely broadcast their activities and, if pushed to do so, would <i>pull back</i> from their lives rather than become martyrs.<p>I&#x27;ll openly tell you that I consider it immoral to support the copyright cartels hell-bent on destroying the Internet. But I&#x27;m certainly not going to further details as doing so would only increase my risk.<p>&gt; <i>list of places you were ... nobody is ever going to look at</i><p>An extreme straw man that the NSA is also fond of. The information is being collected so it can be churned over by algorithms for very deliberate purposes. The distilled results are then used, <i>by somebody</i>, to investigate and persecute outliers, engage in price discrimination, and implement commercial psychological warfare (advertising).<p>It&#x27;s not a matter of non-actionable stress, it&#x27;s a matter of being aware of the privacy preserving&#x2F;revealing choices one makes, and casually looking for alternatives.<p>This license plate issue is a great example of what your viewpoint directly enables - a problem caused solely by government requiring people to publicly broadcast their identity, putting them at the mercy of private surveillance. Government obviously has an inherent interest in tracking everything and everyone down to the last quark (all organizations seek more control), but it would be foolish for individuals to acquiesce in hope of some singularity of enlightenment and tolerance.