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Why a "yank"... the Brits and Chinese are just as sniffy. But leaving states aside... Companies are also sniffing looking for gold in the mine. O2/Telefonica recently wanted to sell GPS position data to 3rd parties for market research. Where you are is sometimes more important and says more combined with time and grouped into clusters than what you may say--- and also much easier to process.

Because it was the NSA/Snowden report that brought this whole mess into the public eye.

Everyone knows companies capture everything they can but they are bound by rules that require them to ask permission for your data, rules about how long it's held, whether it needs to be anonymised, etc. It's the fact governments create laws or simply ignore laws allowing them to bypass any of these checks and balances that has people riled.