[DanBC]

I do see a big difference between a government that has a huge cache of information about everybody that they rarely access[1] and a provate company having information about its users that it accesses regularly.

Also, facebook collects information about people who have never had a facebook account and who don't want one.

[1] the GCHQ cache was accessed less than a thousand times, for example. Google trawls my data many times a day.