Written in 1920s Soviet Russia and banned there until 1988, We predates 1984 by nearly three decades and originated much of what later became the genre's standard toolkit. Zamyatin's citizens live in glass apartments, under a glass dome, in a city called One State — total transparency isn't a side effect of the system, it is the system.
The One State replaces names with numbers, replaces privacy with glass architecture, and replaces desire with a rigidly scheduled life down to the hour. The Benefactor's authority rests entirely on the fact that nothing can be hidden from anyone — the population effectively polices itself simply by being visible to itself at all times.
The idea that total visibility, not force, is the most efficient form of social control anticipated a genuinely modern insight: people self-censor and self-regulate simply by knowing they might be observed, without anyone needing to actively enforce anything. That mechanism — visibility as its own enforcement — describes a great deal about behavior in always-online, always-recorded environments.
The novel's glass city is a literal, architectural transparency — walls you can see through. Real-world visibility turned out to be informational rather than physical: not glass walls, but data trails, browsing histories, and location logs, invisible to the eye but comprehensively visible to whoever holds the data.
Persistent digital record-keeping, location tracking, and the general expectation that any action might be logged somewhere all function as an informational version of the glass city. See Surveillance Notes for dated, sourced examples.