True, but no reason to let companies collect even more data than they need to perform the transaction. Your argument goes a bit like "every lock can be picked, so why are you opposed to just keeping your door open?"

That's a terrible straw man. My counterargument to the "indeterminate potential for future abuse that makes it important" is that the same logic applies to all human transactions, so it's a moot premise.

Increased security standards on metadata for human transactions is actually the right response to the existence of bad actors, but increased security != forcing bans on the use of metadata.

It's not about outright banning, it's about limiting to the minimum amount required to perform the service. Btw. nobody complains about WhatsApp holding metadata about connections between people. We complain about WhatsApp transmitting this data in a quite hidden fashion to Facebook.

>It's not about outright banning, it's about limiting to the minimum amount required to perform the service

That's not how the German government is defining their ban.

>We complain about WhatsApp transmitting this data in a quite hidden fashion to Facebook.

FB announced last month [1] that they were sharing specific types of data between Whatsapp and FB. That's not "hidden".

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/technology/relaxing-privac...

An article in NY Times does not help to make it less hidden, particularly for German users. What is required is to inform every user individually and ask for his/her permission to transmit the data to another party. Explicit permission (= informed consent) is necessary because this data transfer is not required to perform the service (see above).