Go to the grocer, use a loyalty card, and your receipt will come with a bunch of coupons that are suggested based on your purchases. Same deal with your pharmacy loyalty card. Go on the facebook, and ads get targeted to you. It's been one nation, under surveillance for a long ass time.
I conduct myself circumspectly online, and on the phone. Always have--I've lived in countries where they weren't subtle about tapping your phone or tossing your house--not to steal, just to snoop.
I spent the entire Bush administration years getting stopped at TSA every time I tried to fly. I was on the Watch List and couldn't get off it. I'm quite sure it was a combination of my travel history and my party affiliation that put me on the list. I don't look like an average American either, so I'm sure that contributed as well. I used to fedex my clothes ahead of me to spare myself some agony. Now the TSA excesses have been resolved and they are taking a smarter approach to them, and leaving off people like me, and taking into account my decades of honorable service, with no running off to China or Russia with secrets for sale or barter, either.
Metadata is not YOU, your name, your conversations. It's your phone number. The phone company has been collecting that shit for as long as they have been billing people for using their phones--this isn't "new" data--back in the day, the phone company would send you pages of half sheets that listed all the calls you made, what number you called, and exactly, to the second, how long you talked. When the envelope was thick you knew the bill would be huge. That's metadata. Nowadays, people have all-in-one calling plans so they don't get an itemized bill. They could though--if they ASKED for it, because the phone company STILL collects the data. It's often the first thing requested in a contentious divorce...!
So long as you aren't exchanging hummus recipes with Osama's successor every week, you're not going to get targeted. Much as you might want to, to prove some odd point. They don't care that much about you--they care about jerks with bombs. And they don't have enough people to listen in on boring ass conversations--this isn't the pasdaran or the baseej at work, here.
Many of my lifelong friends live outside USA and I travel enough. I'm just not worried about it. I have nothing to hide, and if I did, and I hated this country, which I don't... I would leave it, not cause agita.
Life is too short to be paranoid.
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