This might show my European perspective, but I'd rather have my government collect such data than some unaccountable private entity. Even better if no one does it of course.
The incentive of a private organization is to find ways to profit off you. That desire leads to fairly predictable behavior.
On the other hand, a government owns you and has true power over you.
While the odds of a company abusing this information is much more likely, it's damage to you (abusing you with unwanted ads, etc) is far less bad than how a government would use such info to abuse you.
Another dimension to this is that if a private company establishes a monopoly on your information, it's position is all but permanent. It's possible for a whole slough of similar companies to acquire the same information, therefore nullifying each others monopoly and power over you. With a government this is not the case.
Of course in reality right now, every single channel I go through is a Google channel. I'm writing this comment within Google Chrome, while an Android phone sits arms length from me. Heck, I even route all my non-gmail accounts into gmail. So while it feels different, I guess it really isn't.
And this might show my American perspective, but I trust Google with my data more than the US government (not saying I trust Google, just that I trust the government less). Google is an organization founded on technology, and have shown that they care about pushing forward in innovation in digital security. The US Gov didn't originate because of the internet and haven't really demonstrated a mastery of it.
I think they've shown plenty of mastery of it.