That's a lot to digest, but I'm still not really sure the probability I should assign to these assertions. That doesn't mean you're wrong, it just means that it's one thing to hear a narrative that makes sense, and another to actually have enough knowledge to know how accurate and encompassing that narrative is, and I don't have that knowledge.
> Now, perhaps in a small village everyone in the village, or everyone in the family, knew what you were doing, but there is a big difference between immediate friends and family having first-hand knowledge of your goings and doings and them having knowledge of your goings and doings and storing them on insecure devices which the government can search surreptetiously at will and at a mass scale heretofore unimagined by all but the most forward looking thinkers such as Orwell and Huxley.
For all intents and purposes, if you are born into a small tribe or village and die in that same village and have little or no interaction with outsiders, that village is your world. Everyone in the group knows almost everything about you, and you about them. There is no need for vast apparatus, because the scale is small enough to easily fit within a single person't head, and what's more it's in everyone's head, so is repentantly distributed. Some very personal information is known to a select few close individuals, but for the most part there's few secrets, and when secrets are discovered the likely spread very quickly. The group is the government, so the government does know everything, and if you exhibit unsanctioned behavior you will hear about it, and if it's bad enough you'll face ostracism or worse. The world (group) knows your secrets, and you know the world's (group's) secrets, and the world (group) will enforce their conception of what is correct behavior. Seems pretty close to where I see the future heading.