I don't think these newsworthy stories about isolated cases of this happening were in any way representative of society as a whole.
You can today and you always could find instances of people doing unusual stuff.
You can today and you always could find instances of people doing unusual stuff.
Either way, I think trust now and always in the US has been driven more by the urban/rural divide than anything else. Even as this article points out, this was primarily a rural phenomenon. When you know your mail carrier on a first name basis, things are a lot different.
This -- while people realize that Google et al. have hordes of personal information about them, they don't expect that information to be available to the general public (thus the horror). Similarly, I expect people would be horrified to find out just how much personal information the data brokers have. There's an aspect of cognitive dissonance at play.