> At what point does privacy mean blending in with the crowd and not sticking out?
It's basically rule number one. Tor is all about making all users look like the same user. The so called anonymity set. They all look the same, so you can't tell them apart from each other.
It's also part of the rules of proper OPSEC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moscow_rules
> Do not look back; you are never completely alone.
> Go with the flow, blend in.
> Vary your pattern and stay within your cover.
I read here that most of the Tor exit nodes are operated by governments and governments are using parallel construction to keep that information out of legal documents.
Well, yes. They control ISPs and exit nodes, therefore they can correlate entries into and exits out of the Tor network, narrowing down candidate lists until only one user remains. Essentially a nation scale version of the Harvard bomb threat correlation:
https://buttondown.com/grugq/archive/bad-opsec-considered-ha...
As noted in the article, it wasn't the failure of Tor that led to arrest, it was poor OPSEC. Failure to cover, failure to conceal and failure to compartment.