how weird it is that you're fine with the government getting a record of all your phone activity
I don't like it, but accept it as the lesser evil. I'm from Europe and I believe the number of reported prevented terror attacks. The agencies need data access for that. Not good, but necessary.
But are you aware that Meta, Google, Apple, MS, etc. collect every kind of information about every user of Android, iPhone or WhatsApp, Insta, Facebook, Windows? Phone manufacturer, huge apps like TicToc as well. The kind and size of that data is crazy beyond imagination. I don't care if the government can get access to my WhatsApp messages when some of the most irresponsible companies, collect and use everything to their advantage. Are you really that naive and think that Meta doesn't analyse their gigantic data lake including billions of WhatsApp messages to predict the results of elections? That is the real danger to democracy.