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<em."If you're not, then the data collected about you probably won't be used."</em>

Probably won't be used by the government or law enforcement agencies in the current regime under this version of the laws.

That, as the author says, doesn't prevent use by (civil) third-parties but nor does it prevent use by future governments for any and all purposes because there just aren't sufficient safeguards. It also doesn't mean that whatever limitations are put in place now won't be watered down and eventually removed at a later date in the continuing expansion of government surveillance and consequential erosion of personal privacy.

The reason is that there are no constitutional protections of privacy, nor limitations to police powers here, as there are in the US. Sure, those protections seem to be worth less-and-less each year as they are circumvented and outright broken but they do exist and a law can - at least in principle - be struck down by the courts on those grounds.

In the US, the standard for a search (for example) is "probable cause", which is actually rather different to our 'reasonable suspicion'. Indeed in some circumstances police can use any number of extremely generic factors as 'reasonable suspicion'. For example, if you are at a music festival, police can search you for drugs if they want, because simply being there is apparently enough for them to suspect you may have illegal drugs on you.

They need provide no justification to search your car if you are pulled over, quite unlike the US. Of course, in practice, the police in the US may just do this anyway but more than one case has been thrown out on these grounds.

A little tangential, but only slightly - in Australia we have no innate protections against law enforcement.