Authorities don't collect data on you to protect you, they are ostensibly doing it to protect other citizens from you.
One of the reasons that "smart" people object to this, is that it could also limit their ability to play a leadership role in civic life, if there are people in positions of authority with different political philosophies or, even worse, who are outright corrupt or dishonest.
Besides the obvious examples of abuse like the Nixon administration, I suspect there are very few counties in the country that don't have at least one case of someone in a sheriff department, school board, city council, etc that has been caught using their rather limited access to information about local citizens for the purpose of staying in power or for some form of personal gain.
More than a question of privacy, this is a question of next-generation user experience. If as an individual, my data from uber, google, facebook, visa, amazon is all in one place I can give selective anonymized access to it to different services that can leverage the collective data to provide better user experiences to me.
If a company abuses a peoples collected data they are likely just spamming them or something similar to sell me some product, and they can expect repercussions. If a government is abusing data there is likely nefarious activities happening challenging a countries democracy and little consequence to be easily had. Very different end results and motivations.
When the powers in charge decide to use your data against you because they don't like your political stances, who is going to protect you?
The real solution should be to use encryption so that only you as a consumer holds the keys to your data. The reason the tech industry will never implement something like this is because it will kill their profit machines - not because it is not possible to implement this.
It's a matter of power imbalance.
We can compare the issues between a marketing on Facebook re-targeting you and the government recording your text messages. In one scenario, your preferences are exposed and used to present you with an advertisment to buy a good. In the other scenario, you can be analyzed for whether or not you've committed a crime or are about to commit a crime.
The two scenarios have vastly different consequences with varying levels of mindshare for thr general public.
Why is one way of collecting evidence any better than the other. If you commit a crime, you should be convicted. Just because you are able to hide certain types of evidence today does not make the crime justified.
It is indeed very similar to the government hiring millions of police and placing them everywhere (but even worse!). This effects society negatively and restricts freedom of expression due to the very looming presence of law enforcement everywhere.
[citation needed]
Also define "smart."
It is easy for tech guys to talk about this, they are already involved and understand what is going on.