I'm going to pick on the 5 years & 10 years estimate, if you don't mind.

If no one was spying on you then, it was because you were a child or teenager, and presumably not very interesting. If you were someone of major consequence five years ago (2007, to keep things in perspective), or even a decade ago (2002), you'd surely have at least a minor notation, blurb or profile somewhere. If our government wasted time and money tracking John Lennon in the 60's, it's hard to imagine that by 2007 there wasn't at least cursory analysis available about anyone with a job and credit card. Never mind anyone who attended college/university, purchased car insurance or signed up for a grocery store rewards card.

Let me be clear: I'm not saying the government is specifically tracking on your grocery bill. Instead, you're letting someone else do so, and the data is simply available upon request from most reasonable actors.

Further temporal perspective: Google had long gone public by 2007, and people were long crying foul on privacy with respect to it. So the government may not have even been the first to open some unbeknownst profile on you. It may have just been some data aggregator who put your SSN, DoB and address up for sale after your general practitioner's secretary got some malware (I'm being hypothetical of course, but hopefully you understand the premise).

A counterpoint to my argument is that this is the government, not corporation X or shady data reseller Y. I concede that there is a different feeling associated with the government spying on you (with the assumption of legality), and some third-party actor who maybe, some day, could be brought to trial (we hope?).

Yet the practical result is the same: there are people building profiles of us which we will never see, and judging how best to relate to us based on them. They have been doing it for a lot longer than five years, and I don't see the trend reversing any time soon. It doesn't really freak me out, either. In a way, it just makes sense.

I think this is a much bigger deal than you do. Any government is always a threat to you, because governments weild force, and the actors within government can change rapidly.

A company that has your data is not a physical threat to you. (Unless the government isn't doing its job - in which case disfunctional government is the more fundamental problem.)

So, in summary, it is utterly unjustifiable for the NSA to spy on every average American, whlie it is utterly justifiable for companies to collect what data on you they manage to get their hands on.

By the way, it's not that nobody was spying on me 5 years ago because I was a teenager. Nobody was spying on me then because the government was not as evil. If I was a teenager now, or even a child, the government would be spying on me today.