I'll be happy to share my data with Microsoft or NSA for that matter, I'm pretty sure nobody there cares how I spend my days, and I don't think they're interested in your days either...
Well western governments are experts in keeping their population docile and politically disinterested. So I'm not surprised a growing percentage of their population is fine with being monitored and spied on. The majority of the population might not really need protection from the state, but the few that do, dissidents, political activists definitely do.
By establishing a culture, where people are happy to share their data with the government anyone who isn't will automatically be a suspect. For example people who use TOR are put on a list. I don't know what live you lived, but some of my friends were under police surveillance (some police officer lived as a student for several years before his cover was blown by an acquaintance) because the government thought they had to keep taps on far left student organisations. Considering how much effort they went through to do that, I'm sure they monitor much more benign activity electronically.
I agree but there are different ways of going about it. In the particular case I know of, a police officer infiltrated all left leaning student organisations in order to get access to the more radical ones. By infiltrated I mean that he went to their meetings, was invited to parties and reported all their personal information. In any case, I just wanted to defuse the argument that the government is probably not that interested in your data. Its far easier to turn devices such as this against you, I mentioned the case where they recorded the phone numbers of every mobile device at a largely peaceful demonstration. Since there is no reason to ever delete this data, you not only have to trust that the current government is benevolent and reasonable, but also that this form of government is stable, does not crumble and you don't end up on a kill list 20 years later. This might not be an issue in the West, but there are countless cases around the world, where based on much less information political activists / dissidents were murdered.
