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Any amount of fear for someone following you that you can see, should be more for someone following you that you can't see. The fact that its inverse is a weakness of our psychology.

Fully agree with you. It feels like people who think differently on the matter have abstracted away everything else but the fact that there's a camera looking in your direction. Sure, if you think like that, they're the same, but if you consider the context AT ALL, they're two totally different things.

Why are you assuming passive monitoring from one and active from the other?

The state monitors you actively not just passively:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...