Interestingly enough I went to a lecture by a Chinese lawmaker yesterday who said the exact same thing. When it's codified in law, you know what they can and can't do, and what they can and can't use in court against you. When governments just do it covertly and subvert due process, your right to privacy suffers a lot more. She didn't have to point out what Snowden uncovered about the NSA for everyone to know what she was referring to.

[–] ShotLine@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago

A little confused. Regardless of whats legal we know what they 'can' do, just not whether its legal or not. What we lose by legalising it is precisely that it can be used in court as legitimate evidence.

Currently in the US everyone knows they have far less privacy from the government, or from corporations for that matter, but ill gotten info cant easily be uses in court.

IMO the really scary thing is that now the government is just buying info from data brokers where the users technically consented in some app's TOS then using that. Its legally cleaner, and honestly probably better than info they could've gotten from from shadier methods.