> I would not have them do anything, that's just a problem with your authoritarian attitude. You are only seeing the options of forcing people to do A or forcing people to do B. But the non-authoritarian solution to this problem is to give people the individual choice between A and B. Noone wants to force anyone to hide their religion. But everyone should have the option to do so if they wish, and not be forced to reveal it because that is what you want.

> See what I wrote above about that useless binary distinction. There is no logical argument connecting "I want to go to church in an easily accessible building in a public space" to "therefore, we must accept that someone is going to archive high-resolution footage and use it to build a detailed profile of me and everyone else visiting that church" or whatever other abuses would be possible with that information that you insist to categorize as "public".

You seem very eager to ascribe powers to me that I do not possess. I am not forcing anyone to do anything. My will is completely irrelevant. I'm saying something like "It's cold outside. If you go out there you will be cold". I'm not forcing people to be cold. I am telling them that it is cold. Do you see that?

If you would like to have a completely private religion that exists only in your head that you never tell anyone about, go ahead. Knock yourself out. I don't see how I could stop that even if I wanted to, which I don't. It makes no difference to me.

Acting in the public sphere reveals information about you. That is a fact. It is not a matter of a creepy guy with a thin mustache sitting in a van outside your church with a high resolution camera. That is not even necessary. Plenty of legitimate interactions will expose your information.

Let's say you want to subscribe to your church's newsletter. A perfectly normal thing that anyone would want to do. Well, now you, your church, your church's email provider, your email provider, your church's ISP, your ISP, all have access to the information that you go to that church. If they use some third party software like Mailchimp, then Mailchimp has that information as well. If they outsource the management of that newsletter to their web design firm, then they also have that information. If they want to fund it by having the local auto repair shop or funeral home place an ad in the newsletter, then maybe they have that information as well. They did not illegally collect it. They did not unnecessarily collect it. It was absolutely necessary for them to have that information for them to be able to do the thing that you asked them to do. But now the information exists.

This applies to most information that's collected. If I want Google to give me directions somewhere, they necessarily need to know where I am and where I'm going. If I want to be able to make calls from my cell phone, that cell phone needs to ping a tower that is in a place that gives information about where I am at that time. If I visit a website, the website is going to have access to the fact that a certain IP address with a certain browser configuration visited it.

Yes, some nefarious actor like a fascist government could force them to hand over that information, or a fascist terrorist group could hack into their database and steal it and commit acts of terror, but if you want the information to not exist at all, then things like your church newsletter are also not going to be able to exist. Most people want to be able to do things like receive a newsletter from their church, so making that not exist isn't really an option. Hence we need to focus more on controlling our government by making sure that fascists do not come to power, and prosecuting people who would harm others moreso than we need to worry about the fact that information exists in a database somewhere because we put it there to serve some purpose that we wanted.