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The NYTimes [1] did an excellent expose on this a year ago. They purchased location data on 12 million phones across the country.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/locat...

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It's crazy that wiretapping is illegal but this getting is not.

There is a saying that "if libraries did not exist for millennia, no government would create one in the 21st century. They would instead give people a means-tested tax credit for buying books and call it a day".

I think this sentiment applies to much more than libraries or infrastructure. Laws against wiretapping and opening postal letters are vestiges of the past. They never got updated when communication moved digital. They would not be passed today. They are kept on the books only because of inertia. If they didn't exist in the first place, no government would create them in 2020.

A government didn't create them in the first place, at least not in the US. The Constitution and Bill of Rights were drafted by small committees, and later ratified by each state outside of the existing (paralyzed) governmental process.

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