This always comes up and I think everytime, if people knew they would care. Most people really do want to hide things, I promise. They probably even want to hide things from you, specifically; I promise. The problem is really just, as another user said, awareness.
I don't know. In the UK there are two recent issues that might be relevant.
i) National ID cards. These failed not because of (well publicised) privacy concerns, or because people didn't want to have to carry an ID card, but because the government said that cards would cost > £100 for most people.
ii) National Criminal DNA database. The UK has a huge DNA database, and it used to include profiles from people who had been arrested but never charged nor convicted. A court of human rights said that it's abuse to keep those indefinitely; government offered 12 years but that was reduced to (I think) 6 years. Many people said they didn't care if they were on the database, saying that they were innocent and that if it helps the police they'd volunteer. (Missing the problem of false positives and having to keep too much data).
For both of these things there were active campaign groups warning about the risks, but many people just didn't seem to care.
