Isn't privacy/anonymity in a crowd just a thing of the present? In a small village, everyone knew who you were and knew your past.
And ol' Grandma Francine doesn't scale. Her bad behaviors can't bend the very social fabric of society, nor is she corrupting the public square by abusing her knowledge of the townspeople to sell them things and "nudge" them and manipulate them; Grandma Francine is very talkative but not necessarily that bright, certainly not "we hired every PhD who we could get our hands on and turned them loose with an open expense line to buy hardware with" sorts of smart and manipulative.
In addition, moving was even more devastating then than it can be now. Mutual aid and social networks were everything, outsiders not trusted.