The internet is mostly known for being a nightmare for your privacy, but I also think there is another side to that coin. I mean, it is insanely easy (and common) these days to do all your internet communication with messengers, that have pretty much unbreakable encryption (Signal). That was not possible for the average person before computers and the internet. The government could easily read all you private letters.
Also, all our web traffic is fully encrypted with https (although that is more of a security than a privacy thing) and most modern phones automatically do full disk encryption for your files. It is also trivialilly easy to use a proper end to end encrypted cloud storage (proton, tuta etc.) or even use unsafe cloud storage like Google Drive as long as you encrypt your files locally before uploading.
I know, the internet is still a net negative for most peoples privacy, but it is pretty cool how far we’ve come with encryption.
Oh, my sweet summer-child.
Your local police may need a warrant for a wiretap, but do you think intelligence services care about that? Let alone foreign ones?
Legal requirements don’t stop the really problematic entities from spying on you. Privacw was easier back in the day, because it required effort and manpower to surveil you.
Nowadays, an automated computer program can do it.
It didn’t matter. The government has limited money for that shit. They couldn’t even spy on everything they wanted to, much less the general population.
There you go, making my point for me. That program wouldn’t be possible without the internet. So encryption became needed by us nobodies because of the internet.