> likelihood lower
Not if we take the lore around mass survey into account (Snowden etc)
Not if we take the lore around mass survey into account (Snowden etc)
I suspect Snowden does them a service by making us all feel like we're under a big, scary, watchful eye.
In actuality, they probably do collect unholy amounts of data, perhaps even illegally... But they probably don't know how to process it effectively and if they do, they probably struggle to turn those insights into action.
It's easy for them to collect Facebook friends and Google searches, not Signal messages and DuckDuckGo queries made in an incognito window. It's easy because they can demand tech companies "hand it over" without actually hiring and assigning the skilled and creative people they'd need to figure out how to overcome the modest obstacles privacy-conscious people erect.
If you're a decision maker in one of these orgs, you'll be recognized and praised for cheaply trawling for privacy illiterate pedophiles and easy-to-identify, state-affiliated Twitter bots.
OTOH, you might not get promoted for spending hundreds of millions of dollars breaking into end-to-end encrypted convos only to find out that 99.95% of the data is benign and the .05% that's substantively suspicious requires a warrant and an FBI surveillance team to gather enough evidence to actually go to trial.
tl;dr: cheap measures to protect your privacy probably go much further than you'd think, because while they can be overcome individually, they're not worth overcoming at scale.
If privacy is important, assume compromise and work around it, sounds like the more secure strategy.
It's entirely unclear that it's difficult for them to collect duckduckgo searches (Why assume they wouldn't collect the info from duckduckgo?). Specific signal messages might be harder, but even signal collects and stores sensitive info (like a list of your contacts) forever in the cloud and in ways that could be easy for the government to get their hands on. Cell phones are basically designed to leak your info like a sieve and allow google/apple to do whatever they want (or are ordered to do) at any time without notice to users anyway, so anything done on them is probably capable of being observed and/or recorded.
You're right that most of the time it's probably not worth the effort to go after everyone for everything, but as long as they're collecting and keeping the data they can always decide to spend a little more effort if you become a problem for them.
I agree, people should take whatever steps you can to protect themselves whenever you can, since it can only help, but man, "Take care to never become inconvenient to those in power and hope they are incompetent when they finally come for you" is sure no comfort.