I am an American and I agree with your bad joke assessment. It's rather depressing to see my fellow citizens fall for these jokes over and over again, all the while losing their rights, even their right to privacy.
However, I totally agree with you when you're concerned about the diminishing privacy. I think the advance of technology is the key factor for this. Agencies are as ruthless as always and use this new technologies.
Most people are totally fine to tell Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc. everything about their private lifes in exchange to ... distraction. Think of all the health shit ... they gonna make furtunes selling our data to the pharma and insurrance industry.