Understood. But it shouldn’t be that way. That’s just the communists’ clever way to abrogate Americans’ constitutionally- recognized rights. It is your right to keep your information private and especially out of government’s hands that our republic’s founders recognized, thought very important, and sought to protect.
I agree. But when you turn that information over to a third party you are surrendering your privacy by definition -- at least under the U.S. Constitution. Federal privacy laws may protect the information to some degree (like medical records), but that's a statutory protection, not a constitutional one.
Interestingly, it was none other than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who weighed in on this very point and voted with the court's liberals in upholding the authority of the government to access certain mobile phone records in a criminal case. The basis of his opinion was that those records belong to the phone company, not the owner of the phone -- and he cited the mobile phone contract where it EXPLICITLY stated that the ownership of the records is assigned to the phone company.