I disagree. This is totally an example of how we're living in a surveillance state. A relatively minor example, sure, but it's part and parcel of the fact that it's impossible to exist in public (and difficult to exist in private) without actively being under surveillance.

If that's not a surveillance state, I don't know what is.

It absolutely has. This is what real everyday surveillance is that shapes people's behavior. When you cannot go anywhere without in your head thinking "am I on a camera or a microphone?" you're in a surveillance society. It's significantly more insidious and pervasive than any public camera is.

I recently talked with a friend about the fact that you don't see people going skinny dipping any more as we did when we were teenagers spending a day at a lake, and it's pretty obvious why. Smartphone cameras, everyone says they're afraid that someone takes an unflattering picture and shares it with the entire internet. That's how you breed a nation of neurotic people. This wasn't possible a few decades ago or at least not practical.

Every single spot with an internet connection has effectively become a stage where the slightest mishap can turn you into a joke in front of an infinitely large audience. It is no surprise that the mental state of young people is what it is and why they're anxious about the most everyday things. It's literally the logic of the Panopticon, you're going to police yourself harder than anyone externally ever could.

She would go to a nursing home with a gentleman from the same town, whose wife had come down with Alzheimer's to the point the wife could not recognize her husband most days and would become highly agitated. The wife did recognize the 95 year old woman, with whom the wife had gone to church for many years. The husband would sit in the other room whilst the 95 year old and his wife talked, and share in what lucid moments the woman he loved (his wife) had left.

The other ladies in the church, on the other hand, found the 95 year old widow's behavior highly scandalous, despite the fact the widow had had no one else in her life, even after her husband passed more than 20 years ago.

Point being, don't romanticize small town life. It can, in it's own way lead to collective psychological pathologies just as rapidly as urban living does. The difference being that there's no such thing as "community therapy" to get an entire village turned around. Religion is about the closest there is, and ecumenical politics is about as bad as academic politics in it's toxicity. People are hell, and we do ourselves a favor by not making it any easier for anyone to constantly keep tabs on anyone.

However, I will admit to a bit of schadenfreude that a tech company executive got caught out by this sort of thing.