I think you can still get a real sense of overall societal trust from such stories. Not too long ago I horrified a relatively-young person by explaining how in the not-too-distant past, people used to have their names, phone numbers and home addresses automatically listed in a large, White-covered book whose Pages were distributed freely to everyone in the city.
Why were they surprised? The fact that it's printed? Or were they just not aware that the same information (and more) is freely available on people search websites today? (one of which has the same namesake as that large white book)
Either way, I think trust now and always in the US has been driven more by the urban/rural divide than anything else. Even as this article points out, this was primarily a rural phenomenon. When you know your mail carrier on a first name basis, things are a lot different.
> Or were they just not aware that the same information (and more) is freely available on people search websites today? (one of which has the same namesake as that large white book)
This -- while people realize that Google et al. have hordes of personal information about them, they don't expect that information to be available to the general public (thus the horror). Similarly, I expect people would be horrified to find out just how much personal information the data brokers have. There's an aspect of cognitive dissonance at play.
