I think your right. While evil corporations can collect and profile people they don't have the ability to put you in prison, so there isn't this relationship between privacy and freedom. And I think that people like to feel that it has some impact on their lives because it puts them at the center of the issue. We can all relate to having our personal privacy violated, but its harder to have a conversation about having some people's privacy infringed upon especially when there is a little bit of mystery around the topics that the NSA is really monitoring. I'd probably get concerned if this were happening at a state level, where the police were involved in data collection, or if this were actually something new. But people still post about underage drinking on twitter, and talk about drugs on facebook, so I'm not really concerned. That and I like knowing that there are people in the world that have bigger issues on their hands than cracking down on those kinds of things.
In fact, a lot of people like to think that the real issue isn't privacy infringement at all, but rather a sign of how large and powerful the intelligence-industrial complex has become. I read something rather interesting on Reddit the other day. Here's the comment. It's quite a handful