1) The TSA is about 20 years old, eliminating them only means going back about 20 years. They didn’t need your chat history or biometrics 25 years ago they don’t need it now. 2) No data besides biometrics are required to authenticate the person is who they say they are from your list. If that’s your approach. From there it’s a bag screening. Chat history and other data you are supposing they would try to collect for “risk of bringing a bomb on a flight” without screening every bag is, not going to work, it wouldn’t work now if they tried it with the TSA. 3) most of the The things people dislike from the TSA are things that airport security in the rest of the world doesn’t do. Leave your belt on, shoes on, etc, not be microwave scanned, etc it’s just an unnecessary level in the rest of the world, so probably an unnecessary degree for us too. Reverting to private security back to 1999 or modern UK/ France is achievable now without algorithms or pervasive data gathering. If you are going to screen every bag, and you will, then you don’t actually need to know anything about the passenger before the screening, you just need to go through their stuff (Xray, bomb dogs etc)
Discussion
I hear what you are saying, and agree that this kind of advanced data collection probably is not necessary.
My view is: don't underestimate the power of these industries.
Consider that there's a difference between what kind of invasiveness might be needed.... and what will be instantly sought & probably granted.
Getting concrete. The cheaper bids on contracts will probably be because they rely heavily on more automated approaches... And to make that work, they are going to want data.
Would it be fair to say the true game is to surrender the data of the citizens to a lobbyist that has the infrastructure of digital capture in place already? Oh I don't know, Facebook or Palantir, perhaps? Or may be always hungry fElon pursuing total control? All this "wouldn't it be nice to dismantle TSA" is just smoke and mirrors in preparation for a private capture, read the oligarchy.
They don't want people travelling freely. This was a huge pivot in 2001 in so many ways. The world changed for the worse, especially in the US.