[DennisP]

So your claim is that this massive data collection, done at massive public expense, is not used at all? That seems unlikely. And given how good computers are at natural language processing these days, the data is more usable than ever.

[ginush]

Of course it is used. But unless you're a target of interest to intelligence analysts, the metadata generated by your online activities will be of no interest whatsoever. It won't even be looked at.

[DennisP]

The whole point of mass data collection is that you can check everyone to see if they should be targets of interest. And as societies get more totalitarian, what qualifies you to be a target becomes less and less dramatic.

Doing this is easy these days. You keep using phrases like "looked at" as if humans had to manually read through the records.

[sunaookami]

It leads to a Chilling Effect which has a huge negative impact on society.