[cynic] The public camera catching a random criminal doens't really matter to me unless that criminal actually stole from me.[/cynic]

Fortunately we don't have to look to that. More than once the public road surveillance cameras have aided my decision to work from home. They have also helped me decided to take/not take an alternate route around bad traffic.

Those are real benefits to surveillance that help me. I understand your worries, and they are real. However there are also benefits that you cannot discard.

>public

This is a big part of the difference between traffic cameras and unchecked surveillance of individuals.

How would we even know? Parallel construction, etc. The burden of proof should go the other way.

when they stomped down their own curiosity by refusing to search for more information on the internet because it'd get them on a list.

Requiring an average American is setting the bar a little too high. Ask almost any Jewish American and they're likely to have relatives who died in the Holocaust. How did the Nazis carry that out? They leveraged a large surveillance network and a central database built with census data. Was this personal harm from surveillance? I would argue yes.

Similarly, you could ask anyone who experienced life (or had a relative who did) in the Soviet Union or East Germany under the thumb of those overwhelming surveillance networks.

Finally, to prematurely head off an objection you might have: are these events (Nazi, Soviet, East Germany) outliers? Yes. Does that disqualify them? No. [0]

[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/31/terrorists-vs-chairs-an...