In general, entities like the NSA need to treat metadata as important because that is often all they have. That is because most everything is encrypted these da

In general, entities like the NSA need to treat metadata as important because that is often all they have. That is because most everything is encrypted these days. The NSA has known about the "going dark" problem for a long time now and this is the reaction. So this situation can be considered a sort of a triumph. For most people metadata is no real threat to them. Generally it is already publicly known who your friends and family are and those are the people most interact with online. It is mostly valuable that no one else know what those interactions are even if they know when they occurred. For the important instance of businesses the situation is much the same although sometimes there might be value in traffic analysis for larger businesses that have enough traffic to analyze.