I understand people will go far lengths to protect their privacy but with the internet once you have a email they probably have a good idea about you already, and unless you are doing something with malicious intent the government probably (hopefully) doesn’t really care, so why is it such a huge thing?
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The problem is that government has no legitimate reason to be collecting information about its citizens through back channel methods like collecting metadata or subscribing to tracking services. If government needs information about its citizens, it just has to ask. (Caveat: obviously that’s not the case everywhere in the world, but in most developed nations that’s the case.)
The reason that we restrict government’s collection and use of data they don’t need is because eventually, inevitably, someone is going to abuse it in a way that causes harm or undermines our faith in our governments. That’s pretty much a constant in life: if you give people power and the means to enrich themselves, they will abuse it. The only difference between a good leader and a bad leader is how long it takes from the time you start the job until the time you abuse it.
So when it comes to government collecting unnecessary information (bad) by unnecessary back channels (double bad) in a way that will be abused to the detriment of the people (triple bad), it’s easier to see why we would oppose it.
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