[cosmodisk]

It does. It wouldn't happen on day one. But, slowly, it would start creeping in. As someone else commented: what if, you buy some mega turbo sex toy 3000 and a couple of years later super religious orthodox government wins elections. What if the government decides that you can buy one thing but not another. What if you want to organise a little poker night with your old buddies and so on. Look what happened with the internet. Endless scare stories about terrorism, pedophiles and eventually mass surveillance is in legislation..

[zirgs]

If a super religious govermment wanted to punish you specifically - they don't need your transaction history. They can put you in prison using a completely made up reason. Just look what the Russian government did to Navalny.

Scare stories about authoritarian governments that still somehow respect rule of law and due process are funny.

[throwaway4aday]

You're missing the point, it's not a case of "we've identified zirgs as someone we want to punish so let's go through their browser history to find a reason to do it" a tyrannical government hardly needs to go to such lengths as you point out. The nightmare scenario is you get people in power who say "we can make the world a better place if we just eliminate all the people who do X" and they have the digital tools to simply filter all citizens by X and get a nice big list they can hand out to the secret police.