> Finally, anonymity didn't exist for my grandparents.

Your grandparents could walk to the next town over and give themselves a different name and nobody would ever know who they were. They could get a job, be paid in cash, and deposit that money in a bank account with no KYC. They could drop a letter in a public mailbox without a return address, or put up posters at night, or make phone calls from public telephones. Nobody would know who did it, and there would be no surveillance footage to review after the fact, no digital footprint to trace. They could write a letter to their local newspaper to be printed with a fake name, or publish a book or story or magazine under an assumed identity. There were no ALPRs, no automated facial recognition, no built-in vehicle telematics, no drones, no smartphones to track anyone’s movement, no doorbell cameras on every block, no video tapes, no serial numbers hidden in the printouts from copy machines, no DNA analysis, no databases instantly searchable with the click of a button.

Feel free to make a value judgement about whether what we have now is better or worse than the past, if you want, but don’t invent history to rationalise it. The internet did not invent anonymity. It used to be the default.