Why didn't we have these problems back in the days when telephony got started?

Shouldn't we go back to some of the core values we had back then?

Also, when the internet started, universities and government institutions were inventing and running the internet, while companies were just providing the hardware. Seems like a better model to me in principle, although we need stricter privacy regulation.

It seems stupid to hand our data to ... the entities that have an incentive to abuse our data.