My point was, "If you don't want the government to look over a company's shoulder at data they've collected, maybe we should make it illegal for companies to collect that information in the first place."

And, before the age of massive hard drives it was easy to imagine that we were anonymous - that it would be impossible for any government or corporation to keep many records on us. I was highlighting that information is so shockingly cheap to store now, that even your local burger joint could trivially afford to own a database storing a huge amount of information on every single person in this country.