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In the non digital world there are a lot more checks and balances. Getting a warrant to search a home is one thing, mass surveillance on millions of users is another. What is happening online is more like the police obtaining a search warrant for every building in a city and sending a robot with drug sniffing capacity into every room in the city. The police may follow a specific suspect around, while the state in many countries forces ISPs to keep a record of all visited websites for millions of people. Governments want to snoop mass amounts of data on cloud servers but don't have the right to routinely search hotel rooms or offices spaces. Why should data on the cloud be less protected than a letter laying on a desk in a hotel? Why can't digital services be as private as a taxi service? If I rent an uber the police can't set up a roadblock and search all documents in every car. So why can they do that for email?
As for GDPR it did make a big difference. In my career as a developer I hear the acronym GDPR on a regular basis, and it has forced companies to be far more careful in how they store and handle data. GDPR put a lot of pressure on companies to think before they acted and made the non-tech portion of companies much more interested in data security. Thanks to GDPR I have had non tech boomers with a business background send long emails asking about how we encrypt data, TLS, when data is deleted and other issues that they never thought about 10 years ago.
In the olden days we used to argue that mass surveillance was actually useless because it generated far too much data and even detection systems with very low false positive rates still created an unworkably huge number of events that had to be manually reviewed.
I haven't seen anything that has changed the story on this, except in CSAM which is so radioactive that law enforcers have successfully pushed the burden onto companies to surveil and report them. There's been some criticism of the false positives here https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html but so far this doesn't seem like a huge problem. And again only something like CSAM appears to rise to this standard, for now.
To be clear, I still think police should have warrants to do stuff.
I thought the Snowden leaks, specifically the revelation that the NSA was able to re-construct GMail inboxes without a warrant because they had tapped replication events on private lines between Google's datacenters, compelled an industry-wide effort to take security a lot more seriously, including TLS everywhere by default. Also it timed well with the fact that CPUs were now fast enough that encrypting by default didn't add an unacceptable burden. I'd be curious to see how the GDPR specifically made a difference here since it coincided with these two other events.
An issue that I think will no longer be a concern to the Big Other once AI gets good enough. Sure, ten humans today might not be able to find a dissident in the sea of data with four weeks of searching, but an AI drinking from the gigahertz of an RTX card might with only ten seconds.
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