> There's decades of legal disputes in some European countries on whether it's even legitimate for the government to mandate your ISP or phone company to collect metadata on you for after-the-fact law enforcement searches.

> Looking at the actual data seems much more invasive than that

Looking at the data isn't involved in the current order, which requires OpenAI to preserve and segregate the data that would otherwise have been deleted. The reason for segregation is because any challenges OpenAI has to providing that data in disccovery will be heard before anyone other than OpenAI is ordered to have access to the data.

This is, in fact, less invasive than the government mandating collection for speculative future uses, since it applies only to not destroying evidence already collected by OpenAI in the course of operating their business, and only for potential use, subject to other challenges by OpenAI, in the present case.