Repeating what they heard is very different from automatically processing the chat to harvest personal information about the participants.

Just because some data is publicly available doesn’t mean all processing of that data is legal and moral.

You’re both getting side-tracked by this discussion of recording. The recording is likely legal in most places.

It’s the processing of that unstructured data to extract and store personal information that is problematic. At that point you go from simply recording a conversation of which you are a part, to processing and storing people’s personal data without their knowledge, consent, or expectation.

In the USA voter turnout is 50-60%, and the winning party often gets less than half the votes. So actual support for the ruling party is often less than 25%. And that’s without counting the millions who aren’t allowed to vote.

Yet that doesn’t seem to lessen the power of the government.