It's official now, but it was obvious for years. Snowden published his leaks in 2013, eight years ago, and the practice of snooping had been running for years at that time.<p>Do not expect privacy, unless you took measures for it, like entering your house and closing doors and windows. There's no expectation of privacy in a public place, or in an office.<p>Same applies online: expect no privacy unless you took measures. Expect no keeping secrets from governmental agencies unless you took really serious, possibly exceptional measures, and your opsec is top notch. Everything else will be visible, at least to some degree, if the government needs that badly enough.<p>Of course, most of the time your government doesn't care about private details of your life. This gives you some modicum of security by obscurity. But you never know why you might end up in the limelight. Extraordinary things, like epidemics or acts or terror, happen, and then you might draw interest along with hundreds and thousands who just happened to be in a wrong place at a wrong time.<p>If you think I'm suggesting to wear a tinfoil hat, I'm not; tinfoil hats are useless. A certain amount of civil action, from petitions to street protests, may help a bit. Use of encryption, etc, can help a bit. But there's no way back into the society where you could mostly expect privacy by default. It's time to get used to a more transparent, more observable, fundamentally less private society. So it goes.